29 June 2015

29

Pain Has Just This Place

Pain has no living place where kindness may, in good faith, conceive and breed.
This is sad pain’s resting place, a series of doors down a hallway that’s heartless at need,
but knows it is always a short breath away from the last that might somehow be gathered up here,
then ferried out, just a wet set of soft pieces that used to be human but now bend our ear

with songs they were yearning to hear, and then caught—maybe, sometimes—in fragments bare memory bore
toward the last landing where love’s shining catch was laid out, then scaled, and then gutted—as sore
were the eyes of the children who witnessed this carnage—unless they were stoic and strong—as they are.
I shall lie under a shadow that glances like you when I seek my long soft bed. The star

that guided my spirit past old contradictions and hands that showed only their backs as we danced—
Magic has lain in our way far too often; we’re waking right now to a field spirit-tranced,
and only a little sad lingering doubt shudders over its own sore left shoulder, and still—
Mine is the hand that has held all the strangers’, and I’m the one they’ll still dispense with at will.

Angels amass and in single file lower their wings and seek signals of lovers who’ll bleed
forever if they will not close their false eyes, then open and raise the eyes I call at need,
but they are still angels, if I and my own call them low, and they’re sighted as caught on dead ground.
I am my soul. I and my own will cry out all this night, till my own soul has found

the hugeness of human transcription, the serial lines where the eyes that glaze over first note
that we were still scrying and scribing, our lives lying parallel, great singing creatures who’ll float
aloft on the coming of storm-clouds. Lovely one, one I would settle with one level breath,
I’ve got to go home alone now; you’ve already left me. I’m now facing more than one death.