YOU SPEAK
Slowly you speak of darkness and of sorrow,
not as past, as seventeen years ago,
but as if it crouched and nagged within you now,
as if it inhabited your mind so deeply
its core was irretrievable there.
Then in your hands you seem to hold an image
of what you have lived through, a pattern of loss,
as if fingers might contain it, hold it tight,
although never throw it away. You try,
and now it lies upon the straining table
heavy with a dangerous anguish; now
it's in your arms and clinging to your shoulders.
You heave, you try to cast your sorrow off;
it cascades through the pupils in your eyes.
HOW IT STARTS AGAIN UPON THE ROOF
in long falls of silver near the window,
like strings of cooling metal, traced with steam.
Winter twigs are knocked and nudged by rain
and swerve and dip towards, away from it,
and grasp its drops or launch small, tight cascades
of bonsai waterfalls, and language says
this is where the world and words can cross-
language starts to burgeon in this light
like the old quince dressed in spiky red-
growing strangely, casting spiny shadows,
making the dense, wet darkness of a poem.
