I'm going to read a couple of love poems
from Lights and Mysteries.
The first one is called "Provenance."
If you're not familiar with that word,
it comes from the art world, and it
means, the origin of a particular piece of art,
and then the subsequent history, what happened to it.
It moved on to where, to whom.
This is called "Provenance."
We were talking our way through the source of great art,
of great lives, and suffering seemed the least of it.
The back road dark, half-moon obscured by the slowest clouds.
In the flesh of my hand lay the knowledge of her flesh:
it seemed both true and beautiful,
not all I knew on earth, but all I needed to know.
We walked the long slow walk that would lead, thrillingly,
back to each other, and we guarded
Van Gogh as the religious impulse taken
to its logical conclusion: spirit and matter suffused:
a still life, a landscape, a self-portrait so
loved he laid on the paint, gladly possessed by what he saw,
given to his vision, determined to ensure it
with the mystical three dimensions.
Someone who could say, I know well enough what I want.
I am indifferent to criticism.
And live it so well that many years later I
would come to these sunflowers the years haven't
touched, and ache to touch them, the everyday immortal ache
of spirit for matter, of matter for spirit:
the same need between us I came to grasp
not only through her hands and lips and voice
but through her eyes: through her unwavering vision that we
could touch what we loved, could hold it,
and, beheld, it would last.
Well, that's how things start out,
and this is where they get to.