Spring, which says it’s never been unfaithful,

mixing insult and provocation.

RITE OF SPRING

Dimmed summer. The fortune-teller reads

my palm in the humid dark.

That spring I could not be whole.

Feeling atonal and unconciliatory,

I went to see The Rite of Spring.

I went to see what art in general is about

and what people are really like.

I wanted to watch the shape

of a movement,

the trajectory of a body as it makes

the shapes that it will in a limited ambit,

revolving around an implied center.

The young virgin dances herself to death

to bring forth

the flowering of spring.

Free-verse rhythms,

ritualized, vivid decisions of actions.

I went to see what people are really like

in a thousand human ways.

All these gestures from life, deformed

to suit a more open, imagined music.

She won’t make an affirmation

or a negation of my destiny,

but it’s good for business, the way she eats

through the score of a life and keeps me

hypnotized by the future destination.

I watch the fortune-teller as I watch

an absorbing movie:

I just want to know what happens.

ENVOI: LAZARUS

Lazarus woke to the miracle of no longer fearing failure.

He lifted his two sides from the ground as he tried

To speak, one part gathering darkness, one part humming.

When he walked out, he glimpsed a world never tried.

At the crucial point, there is yet more than one way

Of proceeding, but it seldom appears that way.

3

3

THE NEW WORLD

The world we see never is the world that is: the senseless morning light cuts its white eyes open.

What is the lecture of the darkest pines, the way they hang their stillness against us?

If I beggar myself for love, do I move from night into more night?

If I swallow a mouthful of ground glass, do I not slip past languages?

Thunderous wakefulness is ceaseless needles through the casing.

There are only the living and the dead: roses climbing a battered trellis. A caterpillar turns its hard black goggles upon the cold meat of me.

Drinking wholly from the world remains dark argument, hardly moral.

To be living in the feast sweetens my idea of death, its foreknowledge and its art.

Affliction, make yourself a scar upon my house and count the ways.

CERTAINTY

Edward Taylor was a frontier minister who wrote a prolific amount of devotional poetry. The poems are full of deep piety, learned and quiet, but sometimes an errant wildness runs under the seams of his words.

It’s said that he wrote poetic meditations to put himself in the correct spiritual state for his communion with Christ.

I imagine the task swallowing him each time, moving its own patient way like snowmelt. A poem may hold the unwieldy pieces of the earth together with a whole heart; a poem may cut that heart to lace.