Oh, never mind any commentary. Here is what my calling, and my answering, brought to me tonight:

10 June 2016

10

No One’s Dead, and No One’s Died

They’ve neither tree nor limb on which to build a nest that’s all their own,
but even so, they won’t let go this shadowed place—old branches thrown
across a trail where nearly no one wants to let new demons dwell—
Rivers run between the silent, hallowed caves that turn out well

for those who dare their dark, small, breathless passages. Go on and on,
without one hope of breathing out—unless its past the mark love’s gone
to ground, the very graveyard underlying—what, a gallows? Bones
were made of nothing, then—I wrapped my arms around the you who owns—

my true soul’s always known—you’ve traded hands for arms, and arms for strength
beyond the common mass. When I was tired of you, I ran the length
of utterly foreseeable page-endings, and they left off—me.
I’m a strange, late-harvest apple still in bloom, still on the tree

where everyone who ever loved a song as rich with beauty, half
as magical as this inside my mouth right now, though you might laugh
to feel its sweetness touch your tongue, and bid you leave off sense and all—
this night’s not a simple fountain-drink; it’s love not kneeling small;

it’s all the world that glows before the mirror that best meets the sight
that deeper than your ancient-seeming keening dreams keeps you alight
to witness, when you glance well after midnight into glass that shines—
Dear as darling god’s own heart, were you first born to bear the lines

that faery music even now distributes through half-mortal tears?
Show me you’ll lie wide awake all night, as reading renders fears
their weirdest written-out obsessions—See yourself this way, and die.
We were watching; you crawled out—and sawed the branch. We can’t quite cry.

Twilight hovers softly over sea and shore nigh half the night.
Hand within my own, if I start humming, will you turn your slight
acquaintance with the very eerie strangeness I cannot but want—
If you lie beside me, drenched in ghosts, past hours that claim their haunt

and I am—still a soul who prays, but someone your prayers lead you to—
beautiful as leaves at length on branches trees turn into you—
If only you knew how more cold and lonely love was always, till—
No one’s dead, and no one’s died; death’s not breached once our windowsill.