& now this

yes, and. . . ?

how broken a body
must be from her remembered warmth
to find herself leaning in like this

what mouth so long
silenced learns to round the sound of her
lover’s name well enough to footprint the air

between them into shadow
lines suggestive of the mystery of why
it is so fraught to be a body here

longing in chorus
along ancient lines of undulating tones
over water, cavern, tundra, moor

into the next breath coming
to touch her with finally something
so long past the melt of seeming sure

into the hot mystery of skins
so sudden
& here

& hear
me now
i call you lover

come hurry
it is time now set me
as a seal upon

it all take it all
i give it up
to you know

say me back
or leave me
here

where matter
is what does not
beyond this place

where i
see you
seeing into here asking

where i
to respond
must grow limbs of song

to run
after the endings that come
and come upon us even now & i––

in this one day ever
hope to answer
my unutterable word

Ends and Means

On the insistent impulse toward redemption.

Language, in its majestic tyranny, if it had its human origins around the time when Adam went around naming the creatures, might be blamed for the way that he then forgot to see them. And if the first visionary made fire, it’s hard not to wonder what moved her, in the moments when she crossed back from the word to the first spark.

A common scene: you’re on a bench somewhere and a parent is telling the child with the ice cream cone, Careful! Hold it up! when it is clearly only a matter of time. You watch the child, see the cone fall. Now everyone is paying attention. Oh well! is one response. Another is Too late now!

It is, as a matter of fact, too late for that once-perfect cone to be salvaged. And yet, show me a parent who is not at least gut-level moved to offer a reminder of the promise of salvation, by proving that even the fallen cone may be followed by another. Who, if there is enough money and ice cream to go around, does not want ––on some level–– to perform the promise in living form, to say, Here and See and It’s Okay? They might resist on principle or principled pathology, but still. Some inherited impulse to embody hope in renewal and redemption has a way of pushing. 

It is either too late or just beginning

or both

and––

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