Everyone, loved. Loved ! Yet rain is even-handed and the dead are courteous ( therefore without preference, without tremor. )
To the many is my benediction : warmth spent evenly across humanity, the just and the weeping, on the beloved and the clouds, the dawn, the skulls, the cashmere sweater; on all of them, light.
Then
you.
( Never any sacrament; edifice of charity goes out, wick snuffed. )
The door. Your tread ( Ownerless, the verb arrives. )
And doctrine ( No subject at its helm—)
And all the house (—puts on my hand, reaches, does not ask )
comes
down.
What stands in the dark bears your name, and nothing besides : nominative when You enter, accusative when I take You , vocative in the dark when the word is torn out of me before I have decided to be a person who says it.
Devotion does not ennoble, you see. Rather, it brings the beloved down, off whatever ledge the crowd had propped them on, down to where the mouth can reach, the demonstrated : this wrist, that trough of the sternum, bruised throat, the tendon strung taut, involuntary sounds transcribed, cloistered.
Sprawl, then the tightening, then the strike, suspension, strike again, harder, and never at any point the long even breath of the sated, never leisure, never the afternoon, only the pant and the clench and the whited-out pause and the lunge; only the body's own meter beaten out against the dark : come here, come here, come(closer.)
The incisors of attention and held, held, and still the sentence strains forward, still it hunts the next clause and the next, greedy, unpunctuated, split-lip that will not stop for breath for breath is delay and delay is unbearable and the avidity that keeps no feast days waits with its plainsong of one syllable, yours, yours, and then
Open
the body / the letter.
The world could rot for this. The loved and blameless world, its granaries, everything assured may go into the ground unmourned.
Be, says the wide Love, and be well. Yet the other : Stay, it does not say; closes the jaw a degree, held bite, the not-yet. It takes the give of you and the give under the give and each swallow deepens the gullet it travels, strips the manners off the verb. More, closer, open, and still, more.
So I would sooner refuse the earth its harvest, dearth of you at the edge of the tongue. The thirst that no giving quenches; the drought that made us.
( Again.
Come here. So, again. )
