One Moment Touching All the Others, and: Reach

One Moment Touching All the Others

If only each line of a poem could be its true beginning.If only each moment could know every other momentand we could hold them all at once the way we wish to,the way we keep imagining we can. I don't carewhat anyone says about the impossibility, for I stepinto the same moment again and again. I've livedsuch a blessed life, a dying friend told me as Ileaned in close and caressed her face. I am writingthis line, this poem's true beginning, six years later,touching her radiant face again. Every moment isthe time I followed a yellow leaf downstream when Iwas nine. To be, or not to be, Hamlet asked, and twocenturies later, Issa's poems were born. And yet, and yetthe cancer still arrives to steal her breath, the samebreath blessing all her time. Just now a purple birdflew up and startled me, and I said, Yes, yes, and raisedmy hands. To live lightly in the body is to live deeplyin the spirit—I say her words out loud some days,holding them all at once, and follow a yellow leafthrough overhanging limbs and enter my grandfather'squiet steps along a ridge a century ago when he was young.He is being and not being, in and out of shadows,arriving wherever the next step takes him, here and here.When rain begins, he just keeps walking, drenchedand smiling, emerging decades later, holy. Sometimesan echo hints from half a life ago. A driveway puddletrembles at the foster home I lived in when I was three.Good Lord, son, how did you know how to get here,the father asked when I showed up, adult, from twotowns over. In the beginning was the Word, John wrote, for each word starts anew, each word startling the sky,the cells, the breath. Each word, each line, is an echo,an arrival, a blessed breath, being and not being. I don'tcare about the impossibility of anything. The dawn keepsbreaking for which I am awake. The prologue is the epilogue,the epilogue a leaf holding everything at once. I keeparriving where I am, born and blessed again. I lean inclose to radiance: I've always known how to get here.

Reach

I'm afraid I can't go anywhere without stacks of books, boxesin the trunk, a book bag over my shoulder—wherever I sit,more within reach, just to sample a stanza, line, or word,someone's invocation to the color blue, another's wanderingof fields and grief; and some have died I can't bear losing;in the produce aisle I hear Rilke crying out, wondering who is listening.I am! When I touch the artichoke, Neruda's ode has guided me.I want to reach inside the glove compartment, hand the cop the poemsof Simic so that—parked in an alleyway, on break—he'll hearthe voice of an insomnia, the terror of quiet sounds, how the Infiniteis a dandelion carried through bomb-embattled streets. I'm not deranged,though like Thoreau I want to redefine economy so that an insighthas more weight than gold. Why not, at the high school football game,read aloud a Saramago sentence with all its interruptions, feints,and secret passageways, its wanderings downfield, its ravings at the skygone dark past the stadium lights. Proust has something more to say.A treatise on the mourning dove? Of course. Why not. So be it.Another failed peace treaty, another scandal involving high-rankingofficials—who learns from Tranströmer to see the sphinx from behind?So much hollowness we're carrying when sometimes thoughts can soar.So much space between Sappho's words in order to make us whole.I enter the courtroom with Issa, whose grievances were manybut laid aside; because of his presence I cast my vote for the spiderclinging to the third...