i
now that i’m here, what
is there really to say? i
can hardly presume
to write about a
place so holy to my best
friend: i cannot go
dedicating a
poem so inadequate;
i am ignorant
of the narrowest
jot of this small place
with its rocks and tree
roots spread like melting
wax over a thousand boulders—
the holy of holies
desires no lines
on its own behalf, being
perfected in se.
twenty-six years of
sedimented memories and
learning how to be
who he is. and i
have been a decade in his
mind; only now with
eyes uncovered, can
i see its grounds and waters,
the noise of its limbs
and its shining like
mercury in the thrall of
a blue dancing moon
at once gentler and
more convicting than any
foreign monument.
ii
the best feeling in the
world is to be given
what you did not seek
as i was, my friend,
last night and this whole week; i
had no foreknowledge,
surely, eleven
years ago that i would be
drunk with you on the
blue-black night, the eye
of God in cool late august
brightness lighting up
ossipee and the
mountains like a photograph
negative, all greens
now spiritous and
ashen to see, a cleansing
vapor to feel in
new lungs for new men,
reborn for as long as we
refuse the land and
its inevitable
ruin; its roads to greater
roads and greater roads,
its soft damnation
of choices. here, a decade
having passed, we watched
midnight come and go
talking about people we knew
and how a war
might be conducted
here with small craft: to each war
lord a small island
from which to conduct
their fleet, fantasies of far
youth spent menacing
foes and taxing the
peasants to revolution
with fallen branches.
out in deep water
the loons hunt and your darkness
must be so humid
with memory, as
august passes everywhere
to fall, evergreen
waif, the one who is
always dying every year.
it has been a great
momentous thing, you
know, to have these eleven
years with no end yet
in sight.
