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But that would also be a form of loss.
The oil investing the flame well beyond
the hope of your hungriest expectation,
until it seemed a thing that might live forever,
though we both knew that forever
is a word best etched in frost.
Yet we placed so much happiness in that warmth,
disregarding the sorrow that had dragged
so much progress from our years.
And we both said yes to comfort,
turning our backs upon the cold,
pretending, at least for a moment,
that it wasn’t our inevitable soldier.
If it was all just a formless church of wind,
its wood unfit for carpentry or the fireplace,
slinking its face into the cold,
saying yes to a cathedral without walls.
Stillness reigns like a queen of mute glass,
cannibal silence her only subject.
The vacuum of her empire,
immaculate and ravenous.
The comet has no wings, it is a falling thing,
though it’s falling is older than the flight of our angels.
It smears its image across the void, it doesn’t burn--
the ice in its hair is older than the ocean you dream beside.
It would have been so easy to forget that each new summer is like a jar,
some totally empty, some full of talkative wine.
Living together was harder before irony,
but there was still a place back then for glittering sentences,
a place to smash language on the first steps of the temple.
There were better gods also, full of imaginary blood,
with blue lips and the romantic habits of mantises,
they placed their children in the night sky, hanging them up
with dragons and other things that could eat them.
And sometimes fate would ride in as a single letter,
a live omega bursting from the heart of the wheat queen,
and everyone in the village would look up at the sky
and say in unison,
the harvest just gets angrier every year.
Every future goodbye is already behind you.
So let your life reflect your traveling
like a mirror held above the surface of a river.
Let hunger carve in you an old arrival,
a return to a place that finds its origin
in your coming.
Before we were here,
The orchid walked in the swamp
and drank up the air like wine.
After we are gone,
it will walk there still,
forever drunk on its
pretty sense of elsewhere.
