Refrain

It would never be possible for a stone, no more than for an airplane, to elevate itself toward the sun in jubilation. — Martin Heidegger The dragonflies again; the last time seeing them skim the river close to forgotten — their singing, their shimmer — now remembered, becoming so much flame; as tongues over the heads of the chosen in the child’s picture book of Christ I learned by heart, descent and weight of after the fact, the gift the fork between hope and vanity, the river that eats itself  turned mirror broken into light; the corpse between the beloved’s good word and the beloved who having spoken was ever spoken into being, lies, unspeaking, and as with any heaviness that lowers then hovers, remains inconceivable; so the letter given in stone, perfection in fire; love; all love’s failures; the winged animal drops to the earth and is there buried in a hole where it digs in the grit like the blade we left in the riverbed, adrift and cry- shaped in the memory, both that dim and that loud; though no accosting why it seems that way, everything ghost of itself or everything made of mythic proportion, the walker sinking from the face of the waters, the dragon I become when I talk to myself, what a belief is, terrifying and relentless; I’ve never been able to tell the difference; the brute and the apparition in reflection speak at once — the rock and the rock’s light — so that now the insect thrums and it is surely a kind of tenderness, an ODing in secret, turning into while turning from the soul the animal raised and devoured in dream; imagine, the child’s wished-for surface gives and ripples up to mouth the perfect imprint, saying “aircraft” and there are aircraft, amen, the walker is surrounded by flight on all sides; the walker walks without wings; see, the recollection is flawless, turning wings of  jewels; the recollection is absolute, swallows whole; echoes; and the dragon feasts; and the dragon flies again;