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Even
This Way from the Start:
An Anniversary Suite
This
poem is meant to honor the love two found when love
had seemed
impossible. It serves, of course, as a
private
appreciation but especially so in light of the
personal and
more public events, including the Heaven's Gate
tragedy,
of the Easter season, 3/24--4/12, 1997.
1
Who'd have
ever said? Who'd have blamed
the maddening? Or the
fingers
then / tearing the ads
from a week's papers --
the order of interests moved
/ or --
two for one --
moved toward bargains once --
toward the corners two
-- strangers --
walked away from --
bearing the night's cuisine
or last year's wrap-arounds?
Hadn't our
lives been something once? And
hadn't the bootsteps
once -- carrying
the luggage out
-- sounded incordial riffs --
decanted silences
-- our lives
as something after all --
and -- two for one --
made up
at films or versions of good mornings --
finding the mysteries
star-packed
/ walking from albums pitched
-- into
the lull of further business?
And
-- two for one -- finding their
ways
through flames -- to this good
sense
/ good exercise -- into this
stretch of promises --
leaving the woolens
/ silks
/ the oldest names behind --
spent in concluding
much -- with the
words made up --
the minds made up on incurious credentials
/
refining the likes of plenty then --
reduced with the local
aptitudes
/ obliged by the local prints
and deep dissent…
2
"
The machines -- we think
-- cannot know
everything -- the space
guys haunting / hovering
-- the astral mantras
haunting streams of Easter promises
/
added ( with weekends )
up -- with this love
made more
/ these spans of mystery --
cannot know everything
-- seeing these
human souls
condensed
to declamation
and
the brilliance -- weighed
and wearying --
spilled
from containers
of all sorts -- given
this way through programs --
such as injury requires
-- to
bodies counted as they rise
-- bubbles / beads --
a kindness
made to weave
among
the colors -- bringing us up
about
-- dismissing the calls
from the
first calls and
following -- lost
with the lights let
dull --
with the names the
winter's etched
into the porchboards
--
still as
the ivory telephones --
the mauve and cyan
/ grey and white-flecked
and
ceramic
potpurris…"
3
Behind
that racing star -- its issues
/
interests trailing --
we find ourselves this wash of
sunlight
inching north / adding
its
greys and hinted light to minimums. And
too
this last of March
/ this after-Easter blizzard
-- these
weathers moodier
than words had ever been
-- this
woodsmoke summoning
deep and next
events!
Maybe
you just give some things up
or make your own
close
company -- bringing your hands
to
kitchenwork --
commemorative and glad
-- but
watching for blossoms
everywhere
-- from these rooms made up
with all the ancient poetry
--
and for this flesh made glad --
letting the
decompressions
come -- bodies
as
glad
/
provisional -- the ways our
hands
accepted them –
filled by this dawn
-- spring light --
awash with these linen hues –
with
this dawn light -- reaching
up
around -- a California
kind of
thing -- reaching among
the figures
now -- showered
and wrapped within
the
range of figured consonance --
warm as the light poured
in
with all its warm
authority.
4
Let flames
retell the ways we've introduced
ourselves
-- stippling and striking out --
grateful in given time
-- in the daybright
/ aquarium calm
for one good
restaurant -- one cove where two
might
strip to sun themselves --
excited alive Elizabeth
-- measuring the place
as bubbles rise
-- as the flames report
their motion / influence.
And
you are the instant fleshed. And you
are the
pause -- the completing
phrase
-- the open sentence of our lifetime --
a secret visited
-- building
unscripted joy -- building
the afternoon --
where two --
relocating worlds --
where two for one take charm
-- finding
these birds made near
and
even this rainlight now -- riffling the
pond
it blows across -- charmed
as
we are to be found out -- the
afternoon
made thrill before such large imagining
/ and by
these woods discovered in -- as ready
as
we’ve ever been for spring --
exciting
these winter-tired limbs --
this
seasons-tired room with light
/ with our
excited
trembling.
5
Maybe
I'll write this later on -- say
how
the webbed branches
and ascribing synergies
opened light
for us --
opened the spaces lost
for all
their
mis-attachments
/ the lingering cold
come so --
so
long as two consent to celebrate
/ to study themselves
in
place -- familiar
in place --
with
the surprises leveling
but no less
as surprises
-- here --
in this huge land
verified
/
in this fullness struck -- a
fullness
without excuse --
unimpressed by shaken ash --
remembering
the ways
two looked -- completing
the
damaged lines --
and finding the home
made new
/ within
the flash
of their own
interest.
*
Maybe
I'll write this later on -- pleased
by
these birds returned --
and by these squirrels now --
good
humors visiting --
remembering the ways
two looked
when
flames were asked to dance --
signalling the promises
--
brightening all this blue
ground down to clay
and
overcast --
shared by the
nuthatch / wrens --
by fingers
run
through the turned earth --
setting our own
among the
playing moods' civility --
among
the violet
/ sharper hues
of finches come to color --
where two
consent to celebrate --
and -- two
for
one -- among a yard's
first
primitives -- consent
again
/ even to rise
and celebrate!
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