II
There are lines that belong in poems, but I will not give them to one, not yet. This is a lesson against myself, against hoarding my mind as if it were a well connected to an unrenewable spring.
I have watched men bury the same bird they have killed with tears in their eyes.
Charles Wright writes (+ what a funny turn of phrase that is so accidentally) in "Blaise Pascal Lip-syncs the Void," "It's not good to be complete. / It's not good to be concupiscent, / caught as we are," and "caught as we are" hangs itself on one line alone, indented + apart from the rest of the stanza's lines, which are kept traditional, before he continues, "Between a and a the, / Neither of which we know and neither of which knows us. / It's not good to be sewn shut." As I read this, as I try to type it out here for you now, Keaton Henson's Romantic Works swirls up from another void, my laptop's speakers, + the sound threatens to swallow my thoughts whole + stop them here. Mournful cello. The careful clambering of a piano's notes climbing the stairs of the song. + so I think of the song of the world around me, the children screaming outside, someone's phone ringing + unanswered. One can only wonder what call is missed, what part of the outside they're inclined to avoid on a Sunday such as this, where the worst of the summer is over + the earth has revealed the wind's coolness once more. There's a sea beyond my door, several minutes away, + I too ignore my own call to travel there + take it in my eyes, to see a full view for as far + long as I can.
Lately, my eyes seem to have installed their own shutters; + when I blink, the darkness blinks a second longer than I do, like a strobe but the very absence of light rather than the entirety of it. Only sometimes do I consider what this might mean.
Gratitude marks me just as well, whether the sight falters or remains, so much else remains as well + feels impossibly, because in truth it is, permanent. A room of my own. A Leonard of my own. I take the knowledge of my comfort alongside the knowledge of what all I will inevitably lose + all that I already have.
The year that severed me from my father's bloodline, for the loss of his mother + my final tether to him beyond my brothers + of only one I even love or know or can feel pride to share in a nature + DNA. The year I loved my friend + the later happening that Hughes had already written, without my contribution or need, when he wrote, "I loved my friend. / He went away from me. / There's nothing more to say. / The poem ends, / Soft as it began,— / I loved my friend." More + more, there is nothing more to say. The story suspended or finished. The grief of a purity of care with nowhere to place it but back within myself + outward again to those closest to my heart, toward him as well, still, in a far-away manner—that well-wishing for the separate self he was always recognized to be. + the year of what I'd learned years ago + this year further tested. How I loved a man wildly + watched it mean, what, almost nothing. In his history, another woman, like + unlike me, with enough perception to see beneath the image Narcissus admired of himself, the flesh reflected upon the rippling lake, stayed longer, enduring the injury as if her blood may one day alter the water enough to wake him from that spell. + I who saw it too soon. Both of us caricatures of one another in the story of himself. Her poem. My prose.
The ways in which I am unlike her are the ways in which will not matter, are ways in which perhaps I even suffer needlessly for my empathy replaces anger's affirming ambitions. + yet still, so simply, am I solely heartbroken for the man who has protected himself at the cost of what he most desires, twice, perhaps three, four, or five times; who refused me even the kindness of a farewell + replaced it instead with swift absence. Who yearns to be loved + seen but can only survive when it is from the angles of his choosing. To be witnessed for the full human, flawed + misled, is far too penetrating, an existential annihilation for a self built around its defence. The sword that once helped save him now turned toward his lovers with every perceived strike of their own precision + insight, as if his hands were stone around it, unable to release, unable to surrender, unable to lie down with another in the humility of love + allow the corrective event, to be accepted for not only the beautiful but the maimed parts of one's soul + for that to change him from within all of its terrible tenderness. + I need not convince him of myself. I need not the ending of grace or affection's promised refrain. Only to have known I set it down as easily as I could, how when he made me own the choice, I had the courage to leave it well + to leave it alone, knowing I would not be held in any capacity beyond responsible, beyond like her, beyond another who failed, beyond my own strained soliloquy + the self who could have loved the fractures of himself he himself could not bear to look upon.
9 years ago, I did not know the reasons for this certain immovable version of man, + even then, it was only though my own rigidity could I come to understand them. + yet, + still, I cannot be the ground they discover this upon, only the grounds they may return to once the journey has already begun, ultimately unable to, in the words of Oates, give myself away in exchange for not enough love. But it is not just love, it is that I will not disappear beneath that lake, nor water it with my tears or blood from my veins. As I want to be seen, in terrifying accuracy, for a bond like what Wallace Stevens describes, in his ideal, in his "Re-Statement of Romance," writing:
"The night knows nothing of the chants of night. It is what it is as I am what I am: And in perceiving this I best perceive myself
And you. Only we two may interchange Each in the other what each has to give. Only we two are one, not you and night,
Nor night and I, but you and I, alone, So much alone, so deeply by ourselves, So far beyond the casual solitudes,
That night is only the background of our selves, Supremely true each to its separate self, In the pale light that each upon the other throws." + I know it is possible, for all the most important loves of this great + small life have been a pale light thrown upon me, revealing me to myself, again + again, with consequence + without end.
But still—
There have been men who have killed the bird in front of me + called it a mercy. + I have watched, quietly, as they carried the broken body of feathers to a hole in the ground + wept beside it, covered the evidence with dirt, concealed it from themselves, concealed themselves within it. + seen the way their stomachs heave when they sob into their fisted palms + scream the scream they strangle as if it were the bird returning to flight.
I have tried to console them all.
I have loved their shame enough to not tell them: the bird was still alive.
