Gravel and Hawk: Poems

Second Person Singular

6 Second Person Singular We still bleed for it all our lives, the indispensable, the thing that none of us can do without. Some say it’s love, but probably they’re drunk or foolish; given over to some bland falsehood. Some say it’s the world, moonlight, for instance, or the moon itself creeping anciently among bare limbs of winter trees. Fleet sorties of wind winging through tall grass or hissing down the long shaft of a narrow valley. Snow. But these are only people in poems. They are figures, not real. A real person would say instead that it is you, you are the one true need, the thing that can keep some I from focusing too early on the grave. The I asks only why you are absent, and waits somewhere in singular grief to hear your answer. ...