Winter Sky: New and Selected Poems, 1968-2008

Elegy for John Seawright

107 f r o m t e n t m a k i n g e l e g y f o r j o h n s e a w r i g h t o r , T H E I M P R O V E M E N T O F S E N S U A L E N J O Y M E N T I saw eternity the other night, Like a great ring of pure and endless light, All calm as it was bright. —Henry Vaughan There is an eternity around that looks out and weeps from a place behind our eyes, where we are grateful, from where we recognize beauty, where lives a dragon guarding unimaginable wealth, and giving it away too, prodigal dragon, a waterfalling darkness in the center of the mountain, whatever gold means to Renaissance alchemists, the fine refining of self, the river’s motion, waterlights sliding along a cliff, a walk in the evening, your arm lifted to a friend a block away. God on the porch a thunder and lightning June afternoon, your jagged jot and scribble on a piece of several-times-folded paper. I love you, man. So we have these feet to put boots on to investigate how it goes about the building of Jerusalem, this word-weary soul-world of footprint, • • • 108 f r o m t e n t m a k i n g footprint, waltz and samba. So go on. This is ours to finish, or to leave with a lot undone as you have. There is some other thing you will no doubt get good at. Someone turned one time in a crowd of tourists leaving the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York City and said to me, a stranger, Don’t forget to turn out the lights. The week before John died I was driving through the Fivepoints intersection and had the thought that John was about to change jobs. I had meant to tease him about it but never did, that definite premonition of his death. A door opens in the side of a cliff, looking through to a wide, empty plain, beautifully bare. Behind the door on the other side there is a cubbyhole you could crawl into, but someone says it has not worked. The winters are too severe this high. One must not get cozy in a hideout behind the death door, tempting niche of grief. I may not be where I was when you last saw me. I think these be true images, the crawl-in cave near the wooden door in the side of a grey cliff. They came in dream. I long for scenes and notions of what lives and lives through death. How friends continue. • • • 109 f r o m t e n t m a k i n g Whatever makes the taste of laugh-look, the talking so crystalline-passionate, though unbreathable like the green air inside an emerald. A young man is washing glass double doors with a Windex pump-spray and a rag. He has broken the middle finger on his right hand. It is taped up, grandly enlarged, and slightly curved, so that despite his diligent demeanor he is in magnificent, constant defiance. We are glory-bound under a mosque-shaped potato-cloud. Love those who can hear your fear. Exuberance is beauty, and clear reservations justly put are also attractive. The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, but not today. Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead, and try sometime to visit the tombs of Sufis singing La, singing La illaha il’Allah Huuuuuu. No major complaint, no minor insight. The cry of the parrot is louder than the cry of the turtle. Age is meaning and meaning is killing us. Blake loves minute particulars, but he does not get around to mentioning many, as Whitman did, spraying the pavement with sparkles off a knife-grinder’s emery wheel. A very • • • 110 f r o m t e n t m a k i n g pregnant woman in Kinko’s is carefully making enlargement copies. Find your children and sit down with them. Hot pies make cold conversation. Baking takes precise patience. Nakedness is the work of God. Lust is the bounty of God. The...