Blow It Back
How they woke, finally, in a bed of ferns — horsetail
ferns.
How they died singing. All night, meanwhile, as if
somehow
the fox’s mouth that so much of this life has
amounted to had
briefly unshut itself — and the moth that’s trapped
there,
unharmed, gone free — a snow fell; the snow-filled
street
seemed a toppled column, like the one in the mind
called
doubt, or that other one,
persuasion,
the broken one, in three
clean pieces ... Well, it’s morning, now. Out back, the bamboo
bows and stiffens. Thoughts in a wind. Thoughts like
(but
nobody saying it): Nobody, I think, knows me better
by
now than you do. Or like: The bamboo, bowing,
stiffening,
seems like nothing so much as, in this light,
competing forms
of betrayal that, given time, must surely cancel
each other
out, close your eyes; patience; wait. Maybe less the
foliage
than the promise of it. Less that shame exists,
maybe, than that
the world keeps saying it does, know it,
hold on tight to it, as if
the world were rumor, how every rumor
rings
true, lately.
When I’m ashamed, I make a point of reminding myself
what
is shame but to have shown — to
have let it show — that
variety
of love that goes hand in hand with having wished to
please
and, in pleasing, for a while belong. So shame can,
like love, be
an eventual way through? There’s a minor chord
sparrows make
with doves that’s not the usual business — it’s
not sad at all, any of it:
this always waiting for what I’ve always waited for;
this not being
able to assign to what’s missing some shape, a name;
this body
neither antlered nor hooved — brave
too, this body, unapologetic . . .
