Blurry Finally in Too Soon Each of Us, and: Don’t

Blurry Finally in Too Soon Each of Us

A water-meadow is not a flood-meadow.A working meadow’s not a fallow field.Heartbreak like a bloodhound better off abandoned  because untamable.There’s a slant of light I used to call Self Portrait as a Lion,  Bringing Down a Stag.

Don’t

Though the city itself has long since beensmashed up and plundered for anything leftworth plundering,      the walls that surrounded itstand unbroken, still, as if war — like time,technically — didn’t really exist. Can time exist, if it’sjust an understanding? For animals, to rise to the huntat nightfall, to lie sated by dawn —          is that time? Peoplebuilt walls around cities long ago, to protect the city. Butthe walls, though they announce, or suggest at least,that there’s a city behind them, make of the cityitself — of the various lives that any cityequals — a secret, finally. So,        to protect becomes alsoto make secret. To protect, to wall in, to makeunfindable, as sometimes dignity, I suppose,requires, as in    “And the queen gave birthto the minotaur, half bull, half man, half monster,half shame, and they housed it at the centerof a tall maze.” For what’s a maze          if not a wall with too many twists in it, complete with dead endswhere it had seemed for sure they must leadsomeplace . . . Don’t do this. You, for whom sleepall but depended upon story,        I’ve looked everywhere,every mirror: smell of seascape, children’s voicesthrough a fog that must lift eventually,and all I’ve got for you is myth — a kind of story,the kind that blows off of history          to explain history,as if that were the kinder way, because less intimate, lesscapable of hurt, therefore, though it be most cruel.