Let’s Get Lost, and: The Wedding, and: The Dark No Softer Than It Was Before, and: Rockabye

LET’S GET LOST

      And the wheel, as promised, in time turning; the light Homeric now, now merely Virgilian, predictably         flashing off the waves that toss between sincerity and authenticity in the storm’s wake, If they can makeno difference, why these feelings? And the whole crew gone missing. . .

THE WEDDING

Where there’s nothing but shade, ever, he plants sea-oats and ferns, lambs’ ears for the soft down that covers them, that he calls fur. His     “shadow garden.” A grown man, around whom the air itself, sometimes, seems to tremble like a man trying hard not to, lest he seem unmanly. For his own part, he says mercy may well be the better part of conquest, but   Take No Prisoners has gotten him this far— why mess with it now? Things like that; out of nowhere. And then, as if the truth required it— his version, anyway—whole stretches of silence, for hours after, long enough to start dreaming up impossible reasons for why the pines barely move, like it’s because they’ve        gone stiff with superiority over the other trees, doomed to leaflessness soon enough. . . “Let them strut, if that’s strutting,” he’ll say, addressing who knows what—the clouds, his hunting dogs, as if it made     no difference. —And this, once: “So much of life already gets spent fucking loss and/or getting fucked by it,” he said, looking hard at me, “Don’t you want to find happiness?”

THE DARK NO SOFTER THAN IT WAS BEFORE

Now that neglect only half excuses the field’s contagion, it’s not enough to look back at the past as at a thing to shy from, this is not nostalgia, you must look at it, try to, just as steadily as, for entire days, you watched bees ferry water up from the moss-conquered birdbath to their hive, presumably, in the chestnut’s branches, that moment-at-last in summer when the release that fall will be again seems possible, the way within aggression you still want to believe always something more tender, given a chance, will show too, eventually, as if “flowers first, then the fruit” were what you’d meant all along by a clean arrangement, the door this time closing not so slowly, your hand turning the lights down democratically upon the heat, the night, its night-song. . .

ROCKABYE

    Weeping, he seemed more naked than when he’d been naked—more, even, than when we’d both been. Time to pitch your sorrifying someplace else, I keep meaning to say to him, and then keep not saying it. Lightning bugs, fireflies—hasn’t what we called them made every difference. As when history sometimes, given chance enough, in equal proportion at once delivers       and shrouds meaning . . . About love: a kind of scaffolding, I used to say. Illumination seemed a trick meant to make us think we’d seen a thing more clearly, before it all went black. Why not let what’s broken stay broken, sings the darkness, I         make the darkness sing it . . . Across the field birds fly like the storm-shook shadows of themselves, and not like birds. Never mind. They’re flying.