Permafrost, Volume 20, 1998

Page 61

------------------Permafrost

Let Me .... Let me Moses your wandering heart and pharoah the split seas that occupy your ever-changing eyes; let me rediscover the flat desert-sun of your belly; let me rise and gaze not at the land's limits but at the mysteries swimming near the drifting salt, the foam, Your broken branches fallen upon the shore; and there, where waves surface and submerge, united, driven from the reef's barrier, driven to resurface, to resubmerge, as the pulling moon, the gravitating circle that crests and troughs us together-! continue towards the covenant of your horizon, and cantor to the synagogue of your heart

* But these metaphors deceive: the naked emptiness, the sea, the reflecting moon-kiss-all are lies. I know desire discriminates, that language clutters, that sentences wrong, but I know if you were here, I could close your hand in my own and write lines like the wound of night is the poverty of absence, a town bell, a frail flapping of Sunday's linen, an echo within a temple's ruins. But I know you are gone. And I know these lyrics are nothing more simple

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