Saturday, May 6, 2017

At the End of It All





At the End of It All


How helpless….is the line of fidelity…
like a cry in the night a river in the desert
conceived in the sand and perishing in the sand...
down inside where memory and blood
flow in mineshafts well chambers
full of dark names.

                                    Fortune Telling
                                    Zbigniew Herbert

Maybe by the time I get back I can't be recognized
maybe so much of the tide will have arrived and gone to sky,
churned and bummed off by a salt cloud that goes and rolls so fast
it’s a bullet from a .45 or its sweat in the gun metal
or it’s breath in the powder under the cap it’s sitting

there a Buddha’s thought on a shelf suspended
with enemies and friends around its belly I am not the one you used
to know we both will say simultaneously we’ll press
the fidelity line with the delicate tip of memory, revive
each other the way God must’ve revived Adam after

that brief sleep of eternity so he could open and close
the cage he kept all to himself in the bone departing whole
grown into a woman just like that just like all the pasts
coming home and waiting behind the drapes sometimes
patient sometimes jumping the gun only to be pushed

back onto the bed and thrust and smelted into a shape
that is at once a blade and at once mirror



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