Crudely: to fuck is to know. If that is true,

There's a corollary: the soul is a canary sent

Into the mines. The convertible is white, & parked

Beneath the black trees shading the river,

Mile after mile. Your dress is off by now,

And when you come, both above & below me,

When you vanish into that one cry which means

Your body is no longer quite your own

And when your face looks like a face stricken

From this world, a saint's face, your eyes closing

On some final city made entirely

Of light, & only to be unmade by light

Again—at that moment I'm still watching

You—half out of reverence & half because

The scene is distant, like a landscape, & has

Nothing to do with me. Beneath the quiet

Of those trees, & that sky, I imagine

I'm simply a miner in a cave; I imagine the soul

Is something lighter than a girl's ribbon

I witnessed, one afternoon, as it fell—blue,

Tossed, withered somehow, & singular, at

A friend's wedding—& then into the river

And swirled away. Do I chip away with my hammer?

Do I, sometimes, sing or recite? Even though

I have to know, in such a darkness, all

The words by heart, I sing. And when I come,

My eyes are closed fast. I smile, under

The earth. They loved fast horses. And someone else

Will have to watch them, grazing on short tufts

Of spring grass beside the riverbank,

When we are gone, when we are light, & grass.

*

Maybe the soul is only a still place in the body,

The eye & not the eye,

Something both like an altar

And like a sill opening onto a distant landscape.

Often I think of the cliff dwellings at Puyé, in New Mexico—

How the Indians deserted them

Inexplicably, & long before any white man

Knew where they were.

They rise, in their failure, miles above the plain.

They say that if you go into a cave there

You can hear the soul, & that it sounds

Like someone singing, & like

Someone scraping away at stone, though

No one is there.

After so many years,

You & I should go there & sit & listen for a whole day,

And say nothing to each other.

Or else, following local wisdom,

We should put sharp stones in our shoes & walk

Uphill for three miles, &,

When our feet are bleeding with that kind of pain

That isn't even pain anymore,

We should go into a cave at the top of the cliffs

And then undress each other, & stand there, not touching,

And, if we want to, cry—

For that is what the stones were for,

Or, not cry.

And finally, when we hear it—if we hear it at all—

Wait until it ceases.

And then dress & descend

In opposite directions & never again look back

At each other as we did, so often,

In bus depots, airports, bars, the porches

Of small apartments on late spring nights.