You are here
Where is your soul?
Behind those ancient mountains
So dreary unseen
Or what terror claims your heart
You cannot tell North from South?
Where does that thick reddish road
Lead to your left?
What cities await your slow withdrawal
Still urging still purging
Stillness
As yet unreached horizons
Clearly labelled
Just beyond the water
Are yours
You can’t reject them
Can you?
The brittle graying wind sputters its last,
Get low, get low.
The aimless darkness, red to the last,
Too tired, too tired
So let us celebrate
Nothing to lose
Nothing to win
Clean, free blows, all unawares,
Open heart,
Open sky.
Joy for stale weeping buds
For springing green steps
For all the blue dizzy climbing
For all increase and debit
Here it is, here it is,
You don’t even have to take it.
To speak too much of grief
To talk of feeling the pierced hearts
Of other lives, of vanished souls
Isn’t this just a bit suspicious?
Isn’t this the worst kind of beggary?
I imagine I would chain myself in bed
For fear of causing you such agony
Oh, I could eat a peach, but I could not feel
The sting of a thorn bush
The torment of the dying sun
The pale sweating brow of death
Unknown and unknowable
Each sting would plunge into your heart
Each death would be yours alone
(Though I would gladly claim
Each incarnation)
“Every man’s death diminishes me”
A poet said
Then each birth engirths me more
Till I outstrip the sun
Once, long ago,
Whales lived on the land
With their cousins, the humans
There was sunshine
And rain so gentle it caressed
The thin and delicate skins
Of men and whales alike.
They cavorted together,
If you can imagine a creature
So ungainly
As a human
Cavorting.
There was plenty to eat.
Winged seeds, and tiny flying shrimp
Were everywhere.
All you had to do was open your mouth,
Sit back,
And nourishing goodness filled your body.
Then humans hatched a plan.
They would knock down the bounty
That was free to all
Collect it
And hide it away for themselves.
Naturally, God was annoyed.
All the goodness he had spread
Was gathered in dark pits,
Hidden away and guarded.
But humans blamed the whales,
And God was not experienced in deceit.
So he banished the whales,
And doomed them to swim forever.
Still, some great and wise whales remember,
And fling themselves back on the land to die.
The damned humans, of course,
Put them back in the water.
exiles child 