Yes, the heart aches, but you know or think you know it could be
indigestion after all, the stomach uttering its after-lunch cantata
for clarinet and strings, while blank panic can be just a two-o'clock
shot of the fantods, before the afternoon comes on in toe-shoes
and black leotard, her back a pale gleaming board-game where all
is not lost though the hour is late and you've got light pockets.
There is a port-hole of light at the end of the hemlock tunnel:
birds cross it, flashing their voices at you, and you feel —
from the way they tilt their heads and their throats swell —
the beat of their brief song, another sign the world is what it is:
a shade-tree heavy with households, its fruit for meat, its leaf
for medicine. But that business of the first kiss is hard to fathom:
knees quaking, white water over broken rock, and the coracle
you trusted your life to in a bit of a spin, head swimming
with the smell of flesh so close you feel it breathing, spilling secrets —
its inmost name, for one, and what the near future feels like, time
wobbling to a tribal thing without tenses, and that tenacious "I"
a thing of the past, only a particle of the action now, nothing
separate, a luminous tumult, an affair of air and palate, air
and larynx, tongue, throat, teeth, whatever brings the words out
in their summer dresses — and you can hear the crow's black
scavenger guffawing, egg- and offal-scoffer, comedian of windspin,
so all of a sudden you rush your kingdom-come, the two of you,
insects shedding your dry, chitinous skins. And although what's left
is raw for a while, the slightest breath burns it, in time it comes
to become you, you can live into it, intoning the Sebastian koan —
whose who in pain, who's who? — and know, or close-to-know,
the here it is: two clean rooms in the next parish to wholeness.