Lightered

They say there is a cavity in us waiting to be filled, but
there is no cavity until we have been penetrated. The cavity
is their creation. Their nakedness, however, is certainly
waiting for women to clothe it. And when we have clothed it
and they have filled us with their longing, the fruition is neither
us nor them.Our longing is yet to be fathomed.

If you believe you are right, you can do any evil and consider
it a virtue. Soldiers treat their enemies better than their wives;
mothers and fathers beat their children; and all unselfishly
credit the gods. And they blame that which they desire most;
they blame women; they blame all women in one woman.
They blame me for all that is defective in themselves.

Curiously, this creates the law of inequality by means of which
I can assign all error to the other -- race, gender, city, and even to
the gods. Laid in intricately woven syntax, the cuckoo leaves its
heritage in the word "they." How better can nest-stealers merit
their name?

The loveliest girl in Hellas is rightly the most cynical, but the wisest
is the most compassionate.

The words I had for you were small
presents saying light things, and I had
filled them with my breath, like a bouquet
of balloons. Then, I thought they might
float off unless I tied them to you
or pressed them firmly into your grasp.
So I stayed up all night making them
into inflatable lifeboats. I know you know
they are too small to ride. Also,
they often crash although they sail up
rivers we have only dreamed, and even
disappear, with their secret cargoes,
into those distant interiors where

you may find one ripped open on a sharp
day, addressed to where you are, these
words, strewn among wave-smoothed pebbles,
but the cargo still there. Rare coins?
No. Only little phones that keep ringing
until you answer and the operator says,
"A person-to-person call: will you
accept the charges?" And I will say, "No,
Operator, it‘s person-to-person only.
The toll is paid." And to you: "The coins
are in you, not in those boats I made.
When you look inside, you will see.
The flipside is a map whose face is yours."

I am trying to understand why the plain unstained
wood squares in the ceiling satisfy me. The rhythm
in the repetitions of the same balanced proportions,
or the resistance of the wild grain of the wood
to the squares and rectangles, the dense bloodknots
of the pines in bright summer when light at last can
open the recesses of the dark pitched ceilings: all
remind me of those northern timber structures
where the weary scribe looks up now again through me
and finds the forest's tangles in the grain of his plain
unstained coffers and understands, or thinks he does.

How vain to try to give my eyes to his medieval eyes,
or open to his vision of the world. There is a vast field
of sunflowers far below the balcony of Albergo Italia.
Swallows circle around me. In a half medieval town,
halfway up the mountain, we are only halfway to heaven,
a medieval monastery of southern stone above us,
sensuous sunflowers below. I like standing on a tiled
piazza in the air between sunflowers and monastic
rock. I do not want to endlessly circle and soar in the
air between, nor bow with the thousands who bow
nor go blind among the sunflowers' fertile eyes.

One must become vapor or dust, for every atom
to disperse in space, then come together again
recombined and reconciled with the dust of those
whose openings exclude you or at least do not include you.
           Listen to the paradox of becoming: it is chanted
from the minarets, interrupting our meditation: nothing
tells us that whatever brings us together requires our
passage through ports never before gone through,
and through which we cannot even think of returning.
I could explode into a galaxy of galaxies,
ever expanding outward and curving back into myself.