The Cabinetmaker's Window: Poems

Ode with a Dolphin at the End

41 Ode with a Dolphin at the End Mostly thanking winter is pleasure for the spring. Mostly thanking cold is knowing the heat in things—how it kindles and carries on. Mostly thanking death is mercy for our pain. The homicidal maniac who sleeps inside our blood eventually gets up and wakes his brothers and his sisters and so the body becomes a city of murder and cruelty without end until the End. Archways of the body where they pass in the darkness toward the square—knives glinting, eyes shot through with ice green as pines. Oh terrible city in which we crumble. Mostly being humble was knowledge of our limits. Mostly I’m afraid the winter comes to stay. Thank you snow for melting and earth for turning closer to the sun. Thank you mind of mine for abstraction, for the story the springtime tells every year telling me death is something passing we survive. Thanking death for anything mostly is a lie. Thank you death for deceit and the holiness of words and the animal leaping in the sky now returning to the water and leaping up again now moving toward the water. ...