An Instrument Also

The climate thinks with its knees.

When the wound opens, music suspires.

Opening a gate, I gain the color

below the roof tiles and the tree limbs.

You gave me

the late quartets

a black bird and

a white and the

Garden of Eden.

Your death belongs

to anyone but me.

I wonder so as not to forget. At night in Brooklyn, the tendrils

of a white sex denuded the sky, shimmering at the tall needle-

ends of buildings. The traffic was identical in the spring.

I am protected by only

music I cannot remember.

Why is it that the best

minds ended by composing

fairy tales? Death swarms.

There are many new beings,

the odor of hearts. The order

of the hour of mating ends. These are many

new butterflies, and death is no longer to

be eyed by a young girl, perhaps twelve years

old, slyly, as though the future were a man’s

sleeve or stride. I wonder so as not to end

dinner in a farmhouse. We sat at a low table.

Our host was dying but unaware, as she would

be murdered the next day in a distant city. There is an out-

side of language that is not silence. There is an outside of

God that is not isolation, a domestic animal teaching a dying

woman to hunt. A wound opens. A gate opens. Tendrils climb.

Source: Beautiful Shirt (Wesleyan University Press, 1992)