from Possible Elegies

3.

Sometimes the light is too big for you, it floods your retina
with unbearable radiance, and you push shut your eyelids
as if you were afraid, your sight scorched
by the edges of things, the stylus cut
between one word and another, marking a line
where this is no longer that, where cool chairs
stand clean before the evening light, and on the table
the knife, the salt, the bottle lie in their terrible separateness,
undissolved by flux, unmoving. How generous is the air
that connects these things, edge to edge, invisible flood
warmed in the lamp of my chest? I breathe
and everything shifts, I breathe and all this sharpness blurs
so nothing is as it was or will be, I breathe and fear transforms
into the feathered present, one of countless things
gifted as texture - the harmonica my son is blowing
in the next room, the heaviness in my shoulders, the dog's grunting
search for fleas, the mortal sunlight glancing through leaves —
Somewhere else a bomb is killing a child. Somewhere else
grief congeals the sky like a plume of smoke
mounting out of a smashed building. Somewhere else
edges are shifted to stranger borders, the moment between
one heartbeat and the splinter that stills it. Even this
is merely a demonstration, price no object, of how a line
must be drawn and drawn again, lest the breath
that warms an orange, say, or the skin of a child
might mist the borders, make eyes swim with recognition,
might sing across a wall or through a window
to an uncertain ear, might make the letters of law
shimmer from stone and dance. Who would believe then
those syllables of righteousness, falling from the lips of liars?
Who would want to kill, when orange is so sweet on the tongue,
when the day is to and fro, like the smell of laundry in springtime
giddying nonsense with the wind, and desire rises
softly from the pit of the belly, tender and inconsequential,
fluid as the touch of laughter? The curves of women
must always be despised, the mouth that whispers
hope must welter in blood, the rubble collapse
across a field sown with teeth, nourishing dragons that rise
real and absolute, blasting love to cinders, so its tender pollen
will never drift again in those blistered orchards.
The phosphorous light boils dry the aqueous glow of eyes,
the light strips the possible skin, the light erases everything
but the line between one thing and another. That line is built of words
tangled with barbed wire, bristling with sentries.
No one must get in. No one must get out. The righteous
draw their lines, deep in their bunkers, where the infinite shapes of pollen
are filtered out of the dry air, and there are no shadows.