Allen Edwin Butt

Love is the kindest expression of absence— Or else is a day by the river, in which by motion it becomes clear— there have been in an hour an infinite train of rivers,& which did you want to see? One comes slowly to realize there is no evading things (the heart will have its way, though its will go unfulfilled), & there is no shame in this. The pleasures in this world— soft breeze, soft thighs, a bit of music, words that make a good sound— suggest when taken whole that the thing the body longs for is not & never has been some petite mort, a true thing known to grass & the elderly man with a kind word in greeting. And the woman saying that she is about to come, as in going to arrive— at last to fill the body held so long by stewards in her name.

Sometimes in time’s near unassailable sangfroid there is a thawing & the memory asserts its musicality again reminds one that it is at heart heart’s artificer *     *     * Somewhere in Okinawa there are stairs “My husband is the only constant in” are concrete stairs that lead one (or at least led me, age six) near straight from top to bottom of a cliff face & they ended in a black-sand beach “the only constant in my life. When I was young I would have thought I would regret it, to have wrapped myself up like a caterpillar in a man—but if my name, like his, is Vogelsang, then I must half recede with him

Words without much use now. Unable to remake the thing. And I thought what should I think— followed by: spring light looks like feathers. (Birds seemed conveniently decorous.) What then does this leave I asked & was surprised to know so quickly—that my understanding of what the light & birds could not be made to mean would not detract from them as they were. Bound by feathers (a thought, I will admit, born of artifice alone) they bore themselves aloft. What could I counter with? I, who held my heart in offering as much for show as for a fear so deep I found I couldn't name it.