outside over there

The modern biographers worry
‘how far it went,’ their tender friendship.
They wonder just what it means
when he writes he thinks of her constantly,
his guardian angel, beloved friend.
The modern biographers ask
the rude, irrelevant question
of our age, as if the event
of two bodies meshing together
establishes the degree of love,
forgetting how softly Eros walked
in the nineteenth century, how a hand
held overlong or a gaze anchored
in someone’s eyes could unseat a heart,
and nuances of address not known
in our egalitarian language
could make the redolent air
tremble and shiver with the heat
of possibility. Each time I hear
the Intermezzi, sad
and lavish in their tenderness,
I imagine the two of them
sitting in a garden
among late-blooming roses
and dark cascades of leaves,
letting the landscape speak for them,
leaving us nothing to overhear.

Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail,
sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well.

A people sometimes will step back from war;
elect an honest man; decide they care
enough, that they can’t leave some strange poor.
Some men become what they were born for.

Sometimes our best efforts do not go
amiss; sometimes we do as we meant to.
The sun will sometimes melt a field of sorrow
that seemed hard frozen: may it happen for you.

Truth is eternal, knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.

The foundation of all mental illness is the unwillingness to experience legitimate suffering.

tell me there remains an infinity, lush and luscious with life, an outstretching, darkstarry excess - to know and to be consumed by, to explore for pure pleasure’s sake, with or without an aim.

tell me there is aim left, though! - noble aim, and thousands upon billions of unthought thoughts, yet-unideated ideas, strategies and poetries that only need a bit of editing before they can lift this noble boldness, good to the core, off the ground and out of the muck of self-destructive helplessness.

I was there to take down the names of people who were arrested… As I’m standing there, some African-American woman goes up to a police officer and says, ‘I need to get in. My daughter’s there. I want to know if she’s OK.’ And he said, ‘Move on, lady.’ And they kept pushing with their sticks, pushing back. And she was crying. And all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he throws her to the ground and starts hitting her in the head,” says Smith. “I walk over, and I say, ‘Look, cuff her if she’s done something, but you don’t need to do that.’ And he said, ‘Lady, do you want to get arrested?’ And I said, ‘Do you see my hat? I’m here as a legal observer.’ He said, ‘You want to get arrested?’ And he pushed me up against the wall.

In a political culture of managed spectacles and passive spectators, poetry appears as a rift, a peculiar lapse, in the prevailing mode. The reading of a poem, a poetry reading, is not a spectacle, nor can it be passively received. It’s an exchange of electrical currents through language—that daily, mundane, abused, and ill-prized medium, that instrument of deception and revelation, that material thing, that knife, rag, boat, spoon/reed become pipe/tree trunk become drum/mud become clay flute/conch shell become summons to freedom/old trousers and petticoats become iconography in appliqué/rubber bands stretched around a box become lyre.

Within the Christian story there is the depth and richness of troth in friendship. Dan Allender reminds us that troth is an old term that meant “pledge of fidelity.” Naomi did not disappear into the outer fringes of Ruth and Boaz’s marriage and family life. Friendship fidelity prior to marriage is honored, respected, cherished within marital vows. Enduring friendships were not set in contrast to marital vows. In our modern romantic scripts, ‘She’s just a friend’ conveys a distance from vows, commitments, passion—a peripheral existence to the heart of the family. However, the bond between Naomi and Ruth did not drift away or become marginalized when Ruth married.