THE UNSEIZABLE ELEGY

it will come in spring In intimacy much bigger than our destiny in time, we part yet in kisses perhaps bound in parting's parting, the de-parture of parting beyond the one, in the disturbing rain of lava, you, continuing in the great sea of forms, yet knowing your own self, yet made of enduring material whose mystery seizes me, it seizes me that this could die. To see this cast, as clear as any being which knows itself whose mystery, so dear to us, comes clear to seize morning. To be alert in this seizure, with our inner coursing, a gift of the stars that traverse more intensely in us to enter our breath strenuously as the me begins its story, as you turn back through the turnstile to your glad oasis, seeding matter strenuously as my words wrap the ache of absence so my head will no longer see. Or to be alert as we can, for what we yet feel inside us. I'll be alert, for what can no longer be named in the uprising from the mists of possibility, yet is no more than what is singular in itself and, unsuspecting, knows itself, narrated intimately; its future predicates so powerfully arrayed in the coursing that centres us, spartan as a planet released to spin its size against the pitons of feeling and of plants, is, intense as knowing, as the pyramid that unites us triply in every single strand. II All is simple. Touches simplicity. Fully divines the unfathomable. All is touched closely, is touched by closeness, filled with the tragedy of the seer who is never again seen. All is touched perfectly in spring, though unconjurable in this cold, i constantly know it will arise from grass that will rise anew to witness words from mouths that utter them, witnesses of the mouths' intimacy which is intimacy's inner well, that in itself seizes shyly what is of the earth, and which implicates us without judging: the infinity of my arms risen against gravity to hold yours without relenting in the embrace's powerful touch, fully serene in arms' mystery. III Here every parting alerts us in the plurality of you, seeded as one, in the hourglass: where, in every parting, at once there is the clamour of the fall and, above it, a twice-fallen silence. IV The cloth of the unknown alerts us with this you, waning, what we cannot see yet of its weave and what spins light outward, independent of our features helps us to think out fruitfully the seeds we will let grow, for the weave that alerts us knows the cherishing seized in all alerts, in all knowledge. I see myself fallen into this you as it arises in us, in the tenderness of seeds irrepressible as they are beloved. V If i was not duped in letting such happiness enter me, was i then duped mistiming the vast signs that had melted stone? Or that held in my embrace were just mercurial twinned over and over, risen in mirrors? Time, so big, worked to deprive my voice of the embrace it had assumed, all lustre, all glow in those days of odes i did speak toward her. They were to me hazard's just accomplishment, yet not duped in all they set aglow in me, now past, and yet so much is still glowing. VI So i remain steadfast in what i am, my mouth steady in solitude, shielded from cold, assuming my own happiness i shake off the preterit to don what is ahead in myself, again, what is to the right, and yet to the left of me, above and yet under me, placating the preterit so ruined preterit that still makes me sweet and light: sky—stars, earth—air, shadow—hers, burst into leaf. VII . . . it gnaws me too much, is too asymmetrical, hard to be insouciant in the sphere of her presence. To see her is to stand in the fate of the sun, its eventual explosion as a star, and to step with daring into the increase in light, more light than can ever reassure me. VIII To spring from our own earth in the very sowing of such light; though winter now ices lichen at the oasis of our dawn, spring will write the length of laughter. Springing from my own centre when, human and alone, i'm haunted by the net of love, or purely and simply when winter falls away and spring is misting space in a wide circle seeding hearts intimately with the space of love's own unseizable margins. Amazingly there is a cure in spring, the knowledge of seeds that speak life in the sowing as earth speaks already of earth. But more urgent than anything we are seeds, we are what wanders in all partings still, and our place is also in the light that streams from eyes or from a field, the field of grasses grown before our eyes- us with our ourness not yet undone, though some say it hardens as do molten metals, yet we still sow fire with our beings to help us work in work's torrent in the place of cherished tremours in which our work yet is to be born. More urgent than anything we are seeds, and implicated in the rising of our own selves as we hazard a way outward to where exaltation rises, to where parting bears the name of spring. To be in being and laud the phenomenal, again and again laud the phenomenal. To be yet in being these seeds spring up for us, unseizable in our own earth.