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The Perfection of Loss

Like a native speaker
returned
after long exile,
quiet now in two tongues.

"Wrong solitude vinegars the soul,
right solitude oils it" (224)

(from "Vinegar and Oil")

"Mysteriously they entered, those few minutes.
Mysteriously, they left.
As if the great dog of confusion guarding my heart,
who is always sleepless, suddenly slept.
It was not any awakening of the large, not so much as that,
only a stepping back from the petty" (214).

"Only then, without you, are we able to see you completely,
lie those wandering monks
who, calling nowhere home, are everywhere home" (198).

(From "To Speech: An Assay")

I've read and enjoyed this poem before...didn't know it was by this author!


A Cedary Fragrance

Even now,
decades after,
I wash my face with cold water--

Not for discipline,
nor memory,
nor the icy, awakening slap,

but to practice
choosing
to make the unwanted wanted.

Hours after the dishes are washed and stacked,
a metal bowl clangs to the floor,
the weight of drying water all that altered...

You have felt it disappearing
from your own capricious heart--
a restlessness enters, the smallest leaning begins,

Already then inevitable, the full collision,
the life you will describe afterwards always as "after"

(from "Balance", 165)

"Nothing lasts"--
how bitterly the thought attends each loss.

"Nothing lasts"--
a promise also of consolation.

Grief and hope
the skipping rope's two ends
twin daughters of impatience.

One wears a dress of wool, the other of cotton.

( "'Nothing Lasts'", 161)

"'What could have happened, has happened.'
The sentence repeats itself in your ear
like a pear repeats itself, each time a little altered
on every branch of the tree" (149).

"Leave anyone too long alone with his own thoughts, and every possibility will be not only explored, but poked and prodded until it raises its shaggy head, settles its lidless eyes on you. Such is the price of isolation, and that mulling that never ceases" (24).

"As the thoughts of a person
in age sometimes grow sparer,
like a great cleanness come into a room,
the soul may grow sparer,
one sparrow song carves it completely.
And still the room is full,
and still the heart" (112).

"So few grains of happiness
measured against all the dark
and still the scales balance.

The world asks of us
only the strength we have and we give it.
Then it asks more, and we give it"

(from "The Weighing", 93)

Only if I move my arm a certain way,
it comes back.
Or the way the light bends in the trees
this time of year,
so a scrap of sorrow, like a bird, lights on the heart...

...But they guard me, these small pains,
from growing sure
of myself and perhaps forgetting.

--from "To Hear the Falling World", 48