Like an exploding flash-cube in the brain,
or that unexpected light
arriving through clerestory windows,
the poet’s subjects aren’t merely love and death
but a new annunciation; and we are expected
to bear it, and be reborn. The angels deliver us
raw materials from another world,
though we know that underneath the mineshaft
our dark unconscious waits. We pay attention to it
only in passing, like weather we can’t control.
Cloud-seeding is no consolation, but carrying
an umbrella gives the bearer a sense of power,
a prayer, a vaulted roof over the head.
Like the story of the dead widow’s survivors
combing her attic only to find a shoebox labeled,
“Pieces of string too small to use,”
we refuse to trade back what little we accumulate.
The universe may only be made of
pieces of string too small even to be seen,
snippets the poet knots into metaphor.
He makes, from one square-yard of city earth,
a paradisal garden. And adds a fence.
Genesis is just another love story.
The lover is betrayed for a globe of fruit
which is our world. The gardener appears
one last time as a flicker in the rear-view mirror.
Like today, this very morning, in the subway,
I considered jumping to the tracks.
But from opposite directions two trains approached
with a sound so much like thunder,
I jumped, and fell so deep into joy
it rescued me. Like the discovery of electricity,
joy is no accident. Life is a series of missed chances;
cartons of books you always meant to read
but didn’t, a book containing one poem
about love and death which might have saved you.
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