What Safety in Light / The Breath
i.
We breathed together—: brothers
Or like brothers, moving in parallel,
You blowing your melancholy, me
Strumming steady. The changes, played
Like always. A chord progression is a
Pact:—exchange these notes for those,
Walk through the garden of the minor six,
The shining sadness of the minor two.
ii.
The breath was just
Air, just the shape
Of a lung, a pit-
Stop the voice
Makes at the end
Of a long sentence,
Or the green
Waiting around
For the door to open,
The faith to
Step through, finally,
The field spreading
Its heavy haunches
On the other side.
Just this absence
You couldn’t
For the life of you
Hold—the gap
You found tucked deep
In your warmest chamber.
The breath carried
The impossible word
You, just now,
Remembered you could speak.
iii.
We breathed together—: all those
Who lived through this plague or that,
Clutching loved ones close, raising
Three layers of fabric or thirteen thousand
Atomic bombs to hold fear down,
To gag its mouth. Walk with me. Town’s
Empty, and the sun is stripping the paint
Off everything:—what safety in light.
iv.
So what if the breath
Started out breathing and ended up dust
Like all of us. And if the breath ducked
The door sometimes, slid under like
Rolling fog, so what. So what if the wisdom
In it made me sometimes a fool
To the world, or fooled me into breaking
Bread with angels.
Breaking bread
This morning, at this table, I say
Hey breath, wherever you’re wheezing
In and out, wherever you’re moving,
Pooling a cool cloud, wherever
You’re waking the dead or leaving them,
Wake me. Wake me, some minor note
Of peace, leave it at the door
For me and my kin, yes, all of us still breathing,
You know where to find us, caress
Our lips, hey breath, when you blew
Through all those old books what
Did it feel like, what part of you
Stayed there in the blanks, inkless,
Enduring.
v.
We breathed together—: yes. We shared
The same air, always. Air was like any thing:—
Subdivided only in the mind. The mind
Made the world, and divided the world
That it might become safe. Was it? No
Love without reckoning, and no reckoning
Without the flowering of truth, which
Perishes in all but the sweetest soil.
vi.
Among other things:
Invisible shards of sky
We all can make sing.
[poems]
[home]