#bone fires

…We talk Ceaselessly to things that can’t respond Or won’t respond. What are we talking for? We’re talking to coax hope and love from zero. We’re talking so the brain of the geode Will listen like a garden heliotrope And open its quartz flowers. We are talking Because speech is a sun, a kind of making.

Is this world truly fallen? They say no. For there's the new moon, there's the Milky Way, There's the rattler with a wren's egg in its mouth, And there's the panting rabbit they will eat. They sing their wild hymn on the dark slope, Reading the stars like notes of hilarious music. Is this a fallen world? How could it be? And yet we're crying over the stars again And over the uncertainty of death, Which we suspect will divide us all forever. I'm tired of those who broadcast their certainties, Constantly on their cellphones to their redeemer...

...They would have called it Love, Believers with this one sense of magic, Stringing the gold of faith from voice To voice... ....the chain Reached from earth to haven, really, Like the chain Milton imagined, Dangling planet earth like a bauble. Their chain reached to a husband's  Cancer, a widow's broken hip, and hauled Forth out of the depths, hand over hand, The out-of-reach dying, the fallen And falling-to-pieces. You might shrug At this quaint belief and its presumption, Unless you'd felt, as they each had, its tug.

...I have read that even in an empty sky there exists water vapor enough to make a cloud. Belief enough to make a God. As they change, clouds grow neither better nor worse. They alter because it is their nature to alter. They can fill us with joy or cast a stagnant sorrow over our days...

...There was poetry equal to its voices In the drab hymnal slotted in the pew And in my father's sinuous braid of sentences. But I wouldn't known that for years. He wanted me To be good. I wanted to write a poem as good As 'Repose of Rivers,' as 'My Grandmother's Love Letters,' as 'Black Tambourine,' the three I thought I understood.                                            How many awful times I've sat in church since then, believing That I was neither good nor good enough To write the poems I thought I understood... The most important person in the room, Among the visible, was robed and large And knew what I was doing, reading poetry, And didn't say a word. I would remember. I have remembered, and in my classrooms ignore The sleeping boys and girls and the waking dreamers Turning toward the window like sunflowers, While some conspiring phantom, like Hart or Jesus, Drifts past, beckoning.

I heard a woman     State once that because He peered so closely At a stream of ants     On the damp, naked Limb of a fruit tree, She fell for her husband.      She wanted to be studied With that attention, To fascinate as if         She were another species.... .......to be Like a phenomenon Among leaves, a body       That would make him leave His body in the act of loving...