Song of Some Ruins, and: Choose, and: Love, That Hugeness

Song of Some Ruins

It’s no use walking the beasts of my longing without you, compañero, you whose name means stone the sun

moves across. Remember our house, and the statuary of clouds drifting through the rooms? And the sheets and blankets of our habits,

and ourselves two hounds lying down. We loved like we fought, slugging our way toward each other, sending up flares to announce our advance. And when our city

burned, we stood in the ashes, and admired each other’s bodies. Now I ask you: how will we manage

without the steadiness of our long unhappiness? Can you say you don’t miss our furious

putting up with each other? The silver waves go on polishing themselves. The sun goes down alone. Tell me: is this as it should be? My body

goes on without you burnishing its crevices. Without your faults, there is no salt. I will not again be fat. Even my hair will abandon me, like a woman walking away

until you can’t see her. So what if I’m given other dawns? I ache for the grandeur of uproar. Light

brings on its armadas of taxis and butterflies, and I’m forced to go into the street

and talk to agreeable strangers.

Choose

The expected one and the unexpected The erect one and the one bent over

The one who says I’m talking too much and keeps talking The one too shy to meet your eyes

The fascinating one, and the not very, the one you’re maneuvering to avoid

and the one you turned away who comes again who again you turn away

This one that one the slender the fat one The one who is stream and the one who is stone

The wet one the dry one the low and the high one soaring over granite, its scatter of bone

The one just out of prison, the one just sentenced and the prison warden

The one who killed, and then ate the heart of each dead and the one who escaped alive

and you, as though standing before yourself, longing to be taken in—

know that whoever approaches is the one you’ve been looking for all these years

Know you are given many chances, as many as the seconds, the stars

Love, That Hugeness

Love snuggles us, and then Tagore warns: go on your knees, the All-Destroying

has come—and will hang around a while, then mosey on. A girl’s sob

and a cup of cream. A cup of cream and a gun. Things seem peachy keen,

then the peaches turn, and Marion Fisher, new breasts and a crush on a boy, stands

against the wall in the Amish schoolroom watching Charlie Rogers tie her wrists,

her ankles. Charlie, who rose in the dark, kissed his sleeping daughter’s cheek

and went off to sing the familiar hymn of delivering the morning’s cream. Stones

and bread, Simone Weil said, both comefrom Christ. And here come the shining

moments, yes, no, each moment we choose, and Marion too, at one time or another,

hurt the blooming world. It happens, we say, as though we didn’t have a choice.

I didn’t mean to, I told my mother. Yes, she said, but you did it. Each moment

we choose, each moment we may change, here comes the next moment, don’t hurry,

there’s time—Charlie may say Wait, I don’tknow what got into me, I want to be bread.

Instead Marion rose like cream spilling over, stood in that high place and put on shining

garments. Shoot me, she said, and let the othersgo. See them in that moment: they are like me,

like us. Love them both, and yourself. Both are stones. Both are bread.