You said the arc of things was always
towards their ends; all bows bend
towards goodbye. Light the violet
clung to vanished come December,
ships dissolved in their harbor’s pulse.
I had a patience no one would believe,
an aptitude for silence as the heart-
ambulance idled. I was a lighthouse
on a coastal skein. How could I deny you
what you’d hoped to suffer, seeing
what it was your hand had done, letting
go with one, holding on with the other.

Things

Things assume a sort of peace
if you accept life’s limitations.

That’s more or less the lesson
the beloved taught me

believing in collusions
of inanimate objects,

the knife twice broken
in his hand. Still, I miss him

knowing them, the things
I know, a poem by Housman

for this time of year
when the sun won’t gamble

past the horizon. And how,
May afternoons, he stroked

my palm and spoke of days
like this one, not this one.

Image © Ashok Boghani

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The trees were on the verge of rebirth so sudden
you’d miss it from one day to the next,

would be suddenly alive in it, the pale green bending open
to reveal what we’d always suspected was the case:

that every bright thing has at its heart a hiddenness
it offers when you’ve just about stopped looking.

In her thirtieth year, Julian was dying. No other way
to describe the proceeding of events, the widening gap

between two kinds of life: the one lived and the one
remembered. And Christ came to where she lay

fevered and helpless, sat by her bedside in velvet robes,
and opened his palm to show her a hazelnut

saying this is all that is made. I wouldn’t know mercy
unless it looked like this, and I’d mistake it for love,

though that, too, is what it is. I understand
if you’re not prepared to believe in miracles,

the hours passed from one invisible hand to the next,
but Julian lived to seventy-three in the fourteenth century.

Maybe life’s little more than our own blindness easing;
look, he said, keep looking. How small and round our suffering.

Insect Exhibit

The recluse spider I spotted
in a spigot, the black widow
folded in a divan.

To measure days in venom
roving vein, by a steady
unspooling of the self—
what metaphor, and how
other these hinged
collapsible magnificences
fussing in slow motion,
in green time.

Such marvels, and how
to deliver them to you
since nothing I do
will ever match
this honeypot ant
dragging the body of one
it might have loved
to make a meal
under a never-setting sun.

Image © Avinash Kumar

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