OK, more narratively, because I thought
break it up and have narrative stuff.
So it seemed like I could do it in a broken way.
This poem is called "Until There's Nothing, Just
the Sea, a Sea of Leaves."
"We've been up to the meadow.
The wildflowers that had seemed everywhere thinned gradually
as we ascended.
Think of an unbuttoned shirt falling
soft in stages from a man's back, shoulders first.
Now the strength of a good arm showing
more and more, and the chest, of course, the meadow cresting.
Until we came to where the horses have been buried.
Crosses of thick vine weathered and rope like over two of them
above the third the presumed favorite
a cross of horse shoes welded together painted white.
Not out of boredom, but because I've always
found it difficult to resist looking down
from a great height.
I looked away down on the world that we left behind us.
How unimportant it seemed and at the same time
how very detailed.
The skim and dart of blackbirds in their swiftness
seeming to foil their own shadows they seemed to want to.
And below that the blighted orchard, whose trees could
in almost any light make salvation look like nothing,
so much as a script, that in the end though perhaps reluctantly
they've been written out of.
So much for the world.
It was then he turned to me as if turning were an art one
he'd lost the mastery of.
Or as if some part of him the part more wounded
were caught inextricably in the kind of dream in which one
has been asked to say the difference between mercy,
compassion, and pity.
And to one's surprise one does know the difference.
The answer comes as a star, clear, attainable,
blindly, a bit unsteadily, stutter of gratitude,
sway of despair.
The hand rises, as if at last to reach for it."