By the time we finally learn,
it’s too late: the clock of the body
turns over the hours,
the days, our faces,
like pages in a book –
half-glimpsed, half-known,
gone.
The clock of the heart has odd hitches
in its ticking, missed beats,
and between them,
timeless –
our fingers, fragile deer running
through forests of soft hair,
that glance over a shoulder,
fragments of song –
and then the drum keeps drumming, then
the march over the edge.
And we’re always
leaping,
the sonata half-memorized,
our fingers, old or young, so clumsy
with desire – grass, pear, belly,
pine, we’re too small
to hold it.
We do what caught animals do –
we press against the walls
and they give way:
this life, no body can contain
or outlast it,
and who knows
if stars know what love is
or if God remembers anything
beyond that first loneliness,
that first division
between water
and light.
