There are things I tell to no one.
Those close to me might think
I was depressed, and try to comfort me.
At such times I go off alone, in silence, as if listening for God.
I say "God"; I believe,
rather, in the music of grace
that we hear, sometimes, playing
from the other side of happiness.
When we hear it and it flows
through our bodies, it lets us live
these days intensified by their vanity
worshiping, as the other animals do,
who live and die in the spirit
of the end, that backward-spreading
brightness. It speaks in notes struck
or caressed or blown or plucked
off our own bodies;
remember
existence already remembers
the flush upon it you will have been,
you who have reached out ahead
and touched the dust we become.
Just as the supreme cry
of joy has a ghastliness to it,
as though it touched forward
into the chaos where we break apart,
so the death-groan, though sounding
from another direction, carries us back
to our first world, where we see
a grandmother sitting only yesterday
oddly fearless on the tidy porch, her little boned body drowsing
almost unobserved into the agreement to die.
Brothers and sisters;
lovers and children;
great mothers and grand fathers
whose love-times have been chiseled
by now into stone; great
grand foetuses spelling
the past into the flesh's waters
can you bless, or not curse,
everything that struggles to stay alive
on this planet of struggles?
Then the last cry in the throat
or only imagined into it
by its threads to wasted to make sound,
will disappear into the music
that carries our time on earth
away, on the catafalque
of bones marrowed with god's-flesh
thighs bruised by the blue flower,
pelvis that makes angels shiver to know down here we make love
with our bones,
I want to live forever. But when I hear
through the walls grace-notes blown
out of wormed-out bones,
music that their memory of blood
plucks from the straitened arteries,
music that lovers caressed from each other
in the holy days of their vanity,
that the two hearts drummed
out of their ribs together,
the hearts that know everything (and even
stays, to be the light of his house),
then it is not so difficult
to go out and turn and face
the spaces that gather into one
sound the waves of spent existence
that flow toward, and toward, and on which we flow
and grow drowsy and become fearless again.
I do not see the sense in investing in a reality that distracts from, clutters up, destroys, and disrespects the things I love. I cannot invest in my own entrapment. I cannot spend the fleeting moments of my existence in the utter loathsome degradation necessitated by consumptive endeavors of capitalist conditioning. To do so would be to ignore intrinsic questions of human existence; questions of purpose, meaning, integrity, and beauty.
