The outpouring

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

Impossible

One soft-winded luck-drenched
Park bench afternoon
While dust motes drifted languidly
In and out of sunbeam streams
Eyelids too closed to bother

I dreamed of life
Of love-stained moons
Lake-bound loons and the stars
And a vastness so supreme
Only a poor cosmic ash of a
Barely dim spark
Could comprehend it

I dreamed of the gravity of gravity
Of the long loose distance
Between here and now
Of the slow dip of the long journey

The road moves easily within
And without the fortress skull
At a whim
At an ungrim wager
With vaporous fate

I dreamed of how in old age
The bones of our deciduous dreams
Absurdly seductive
Still nudge us toward the impossible

Having arrived at which
We stare longingly behind