Before the Bone Marrow Transplant
CHRISTMAS 2022
It is Christmas 2023.
I am me, sitting in my studio looking over these notes.
An early snow (for atmosphere) floats
—clear, spare—through the bare limbs of the oak tree,
lightly and precisely redefining its guise.
The silence is such as makes one realize
silence never is, this hum the mystics call eternity.
Behind me a vast tranche of suffering lies,
in both senses: reality
I have endured and assimilated as I can,
extracting from pain a keener means to see; and,
strict formulation that says,
for all the beauty there is, for all this quick of limb and eyes
merged and made available to mind,
it is suffering that makes it shine.
Soon my wife will stir,
sunlight, because I see it, cherishing her
as she emerges from sheets and begins to dress.
My children will wake to what they think is godless joy
texting me to come down to Christmas
Now, Now
and I will think back to Christmas as a boy
and how, amid much suffering, for a time all was instant
and bright surprise. This will be done,
poem, prayer, piece of being, the tiny and entire story
of the passionate transitory in which our lives are hung.
I in my undominion rising to be among.
The One Day
When sleep was sleep and dawn was ponderable.
When idioms sillied lavish and impure
the iron integument of life itself,
and laughter tore the morning ten thousand things.
Tiny eternities of talk and touch,
explicit, unforeshadowing, light of light.
When famous suffering was just one of us,
love was license and license was law.
When evening ended. Memory was a matter
of matter. And a fastness lost to clocks.
Thunder Wonder
Thunder wonder and a dream of being
at the exact and exacting
edge of rain, happy to have myself
so mystically split yet compelled
to step into an utter
one way or another. It must exist,
that elliptical but unmistakable line
where one might stand with single mind
experiencing luck or lack
depending:
relief that rain has finally come,
relief that rain is finally ending.
If I remembered how the dream
resolved, which way I chose or whether
weather itself determined,
if I could chalk it all to metaphor
and separate tenor from vehicle,
dearth from store, it seems
some main confusion in my life
would come clear. In truth, I’m left
with that half-elated, half-depleted
feeling of coming back
to consciousness, bereft
of something I can’t even name, and called
with all my mongrel words to praise
the very same.
Pity the Man
Pity the man who’s mastered all
the dialects of silence,
who suffers the arpeggios of snow
and in the bright kaleidoscope of fall,
as the colors combine and crescendo,
hears the oak tree plead release.
Pity the man who understands
the gift and gravity of what is not,
who lives to its conclusion
the doctrine of Saint Paul:
if being more means being less,
God’s truest form is godlessness.
Pity the man whom history missed,
who, as the lie like a parasite
ate brain by brain into a single sheep,
remained immune.
Soul is the oath that he must keep,
loyal to this country called Alone.
Pity the man whose last command
comes from a cloud or a cup of tea,
his task to stand with and to withstand
the hard wind and what it blows,
to reconcile the rage in the rapist’s eyes
with the power that perfects the rose.
Of Love and Lice
When the turkey vulture
turns the dull black-red
coagulation of its head and
does not look away,
and, on their bedroom wall, each sees an
inch-thick patch of purpled mold
like Satan’s crochet,
they weep for the lives life
denies,
then damn near split their dungarees
getting them shucked,
the moral being:
believe what you are seeing, but
there are subtleties
to being fucked.
Balm
The heart, it hoards
—KEVIN YOUNG
“The poems are a balm,” the poet said,
whose ear endured,
besides the natural atrophy of any unearned gift,
history, mastery, and all the mosquito demons
of email and oil changes, underlings and overlords,
afternoons of disappointment and self-taste
too heavy and humid to move. “Amid it all,”
the poet wrote, meaning loves, meaning
deaths, meaning the lack of meaning
infiltrating even heart and hoard, love and death,
“the poems are a balm”—meaning,
in ancient days, a substance fragrant, resinous,
effective, for a time, against decay.