Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy

No one knew how to live there     merciless mid-Atlantic heat     grime on the hot car windowsand trash-heaps along schoolyards     we wentto neighborhood markets for collardsSaturday     the humidity at 9 a.m. already un-bearable     in grooves down our cheeksrough trust     that we wouldn’t have to staymake a home there     never a grandcity at night where blue-sooted eveningsyou could stand on the sidewalk     and look in

Windows fire-bled so that figures at mealsseemed to rise in gray radiance

Who looks inside     says less and lessthe years abandoning their force I rememberblack shades of red wine     the books I could barelyafford     twice a day to the libraryhomeless men asleep by its pillars afternoonrains in Baltimore     dark blueagainst the energy at work in my head

And so often in the afternoons I have felt thisstrange mental life     curving     separateas if my blood were iron     the stormsarriving in patterns of lush thundera cool spray     spun back from the grass

Once I lived throatless     believed thatholding back sorrow would make sorrowsoften     So easy to place an Xover who you were     the soil under rainnow the fires shifting platesbeneath this wet cement And if I have hoped for moreit is only the whole of lonelinessswept away by understanding

Who were you then     wanting to learnreading all day all night     fall in a strange cityyear after year     No one knew what to tell mekeep studying     through the bay window sirensand the silences that followed     snow blurring downto the sick city-trees     walking to campus hi hellothe women in Italian boots for seminarsfour hours later     at the crosswalk you sawno one you knew

You greet each person on the street     and the darkcivilization of wind slams through you

No one knew what was coming     miscarriagedivorce disease     the country at war     airbrightening and darkening around the notebooksI hauled wherever I went     was I meantto understand then how little I wouldmatter to the future     I spent winterssummers     trying to see     driving out to the horse farmspoplars lining the road     pools of sunlight sinking intofields     the air darkening how longcan you wait     your body crowded-over withclouds and grasses     whole childhoods of grain blownback and forth inside your eyes

I waited a long time     to find youlate in my life     homesick for nothing I couldrecognize     another winter in an eastern city iron grates dusting over with snow     quiet cellsat night undetected     forgettable by dawnStill I watched you place your hand     against the window’sice-burned sheet     and trace wet stars thatrose in ghostly lines during the city’snight-slowed snowfall     warehousesleaping to your touch roughed in brickYour eyes     everything worth striving forto be what you saw     There were timeswith you     burning through skin marrow shadow nightafter night     what you brought to my body when we agreed onsilence I never imagined     such closeness

Despite the terrible predictions     we drove to the coastminus 10 and the beach was frozen     pressedtransparent ice against our eyesAnd nobody stood with us     troubled by the ocean materialsoily debris     carcasses of sea fish languishingfrozen by the iced seaweed     a kind of tundra we crossedas though     had we kept moving a     creature might simplyturn alive     the gulls huddling in their slickedwings for heat     our lungsdraining     filling with ice air

And the wide stillnesswhere the gull-cries should have been

Place an X over who you wereit doesn’t help     Shut your eyes there areabrasions beneath the eyelids     Coming to understandthe ones you most love will die     out hereI can feel the weight of the sky     the eveningturning black its arid grasses

You changed who I was     around you I feltthe need for pattern a physical needto bring the hard light of the starsinside     it...