Blow It Back

How they woke, finally, in a bed of ferns — horsetail ferns. How they died singing. All night, meanwhile, as if somehow the fox’s mouth that so much of this life has amounted to had briefly unshut itself — and the moth that’s trapped there, unharmed, gone free — a snow fell; the snow-filled street seemed a toppled column, like the one in the mind called doubt, or that other one, persuasion, the broken one, in three clean pieces    ...    Well, it’s morning, now. Out back, the bamboo bows and stiffens. Thoughts in a wind. Thoughts like (but nobody saying it): Nobody, I think, knows me better by now than you do. Or like: The bamboo, bowing, stiffening, seems like nothing so much as, in this light, competing forms of betrayal that, given time, must surely cancel each other out, close your eyes; patience; wait. Maybe less the foliage than the promise of it. Less that shame exists, maybe, than that the world keeps saying it does,know it, hold on tight to it, as if the world were rumor, how every rumor rings true, lately. When I’m ashamed, I make a point of reminding myself what is shame but to have shown — to have let it show — that variety of love that goes hand in hand with having wished to please and, in pleasing, for a while belong. So shame can, like love, be an eventual way through? There’s a minor chord sparrows make with doves that’s not the usual business — it’s not sad at all, any of it: this always waiting for what I’ve always waited for; this not being able to assign to what’s missing some shape, a name; this body neither antlered nor hooved — brave too, this body, unapologetic    ...