What I Want to Say

I
It is as simple as it can be.
I will leave off my clothes
(which is a kind of leveling, isn’t it?)
and address you as nakedly
as anyone can.

Each one was perfect,
that is what I want to say.
Perfect.

There is no one perfection,
only a loving.
And it is always extraordinary.
One wild iris clump,
carried from Maine in a coffee can,
this third year gave me, in the mild summer,
twenty-one exquisite blue flowers.
A showy ten, then a more delicate seven,
then, further down on the stems,
an unlooked for four.

Don’t you understand,
we are all saying the same thing.

It is against everything you know,
everything you believe,
and it is true.
“Tukaram….”
There are more kinds of desire than you know.

I am telling you as nakedly as I can.
It happens in time.

When, somewhere, one wave of the sea begins moving,
one moved by the sun, let us say,
the next by the stars, let us say,
the next by the moon,
(I told you you would never believe it)
it is not spent.
It folds back and reenters the sea,
where it is indistinguishable from any other,
the sea who says each time,
“It is what I am.”

And each one is perfect.
Do you hear me, my dear, my dears?

II
What do you think love is, anyway?
I’ll tell you, a harrowing.
And I stand here helpless with what I know,
because in that Ministry
to be understood leads straight to the room
where understanding stops
and a final scream is that of the selt
preserving itself.

To say I love you is a humiliation.
The weak tears gathering in the eyes
drip on a chessboard one fiddles with alone then,
mourning the betrayal of
some other possibility.
It is the absolute narrowing of possibilities,
and everyone, down to the last man,
dreads it.

III
It is the eye that calls, as if it were sleepless,
that says in its call, “Come to the window, see,
at the top of some moon-wracked peak
a record is spinning.”

The eye calls the flesh from a sarabande
it is busy composing, “Come, there is something. …
and not because it is there, because it is not yet there,
and who knows if it is complex, or simple.

That music neither of us can hear,
not transformations but changes,
will move us yet.”