What the blackness in the 

universal trench and shovel returns me to

is the blackness  in myself–earth clotted on

my tongue,  mud plastered upon

my eyelids, squawking as a parrot

repeating words it cannot comprehend,  an angel’s stutter, a book full of

indictments of the dead who fell out of the lists of life like black water falling out of

my  arms–how will I hang onto

my children? or cling to the table with

its pale profusions of flowers, and how

do the living ever answer the dead,  their presence pouring out of

the radio and filling up the car?

                                             Once every heart

had its own village, and every village

had its own cemetery, and was it enough

to undress the body one knew so well and lower it into

the blackness of the ancient ocean that broke at the edge of

the forest, at the edge of the world ?. . . but now each of

us has put on the knowledge of God without

the power. . .  

                        Each night my tiny hours fill up with

the illiterate x’s and statistics of the

dead, and the ancient answers do not

answer, so I  throw what I am, a stone to shatter the lack

of reflection, a crumb of bread to break the waters,

pushed to the lack and labor of being, where I know nothing except

I love you and that too arrives with its sadness, a glass of black water

held by your hand that seems so full of light.

 

 

 

© Rebecca Seiferle