July 7, 2006

I thought that pain meant

I was not loved.

It meant I loved.

And so the silence of morning

pierced by birdsong,

or is it the celestial music

of ravishing angels that heralds the day?

I glimpsed myself

in the blinking of an eye

a flame, a ravaging fire,

Elijah’s chariot drawn by horses of fire,

ascending

up into heaven: the meaning,

perhaps, of God, or the answer

to prayer: in this vision the uplift

from out of the mire into glory intended,

or perhaps it is the answer to nothing,

but is the fact of prayer…presence intensified,

oracular.

The perfect bright-yellow radii

of the head of the sunflower

splinters the dark morn, light

remembering its colors, its proper

nature that darkness cannot swallow up:

in morning’s shattered, though lambent light,

everything’s growing so lush,

space flower-filled, roses

stretching up into the canopy of dogwood.

How will it all fit in August? But

there’s this too to the day yet to come:

after the vision of fire, the face

soft and slightly mapped, the doctor

under whose direction the chemicals

will be administered: how fragile the earth;

how strange compassion under the aspect

of intelligence

melds to put off…some…

the loss of what has been loved:

how fragile the eternal

...the infinite.