Never To Be Cast Away Are the Gifts the Gods Have Given

In Memory of Hudson Bowne

i.

Staggered back, a scope of land stung on the sea
Shimmers in the distant haze of a dream, while noon
Brightens this slope of beach. I'm hear for a reason
That seems to be losing itself in the spun green spray.

I stare at, till images drown the mind. Love,
Is it? opens irrational inner landscapes
Where doing and suffering, dressed in the lonely shapes
Of themselves, become known. These regions are where I live.

Now, riding the dissolving surfaces of Earth,
The sea heaves reef-broken water upon the beach,
And the sand glitters to snow from the bare reaches
Of Hell, and the ranges of waste steepen in the North

Where nothing matters. My dead love, this
Is the slow seeing that turned your eyes to stone-
A leached plain level under a vacant sun.
In the teeth of your failed faith I hurled a promise

Made strangely from unbreakable spans of joy
Joining your death, my life, my grief. Never
To be cast away are the gifts the gods have given
That no one can have for wanting. I've cast away

Nothing yielded me, and this is for your sake,
For whom I wanted breath, for whom went weeping
To Hell, for whom came back without. I'll keep
The hard unequal bargain struck in the breaking

Winter-death for knowledge-though nothing I know
Balances your loss. Yet, love, what shall I hold
In the passes of sorrow? I wear integral cold.
The look in the eyes of the dead is worthless. Snow,

As incoherent as this endless sand,
Is what you gave me, after I had learned
To balance, mount and close in the burned
Arcs of your body, stayed by your taking hand.

Through your brown eyes outstaring chance and shame
I grew more chaste by changing the abstract gift
Of body with you, and you, more arrogant after.
And cruel, and young, I think, years later, naming

Your life with no less love. But I've known more
Than you, more summers than one, more falls. I know
They end on godforsaken streets of snow.
You would have left me, no matter what you swore.

ii.

And what could I then have believed in? But you died
Before you could be inconstant. As things are,
I can trust love, stay honest, speak. I fear
The collapsing sands and veins of waste inside

That murdered you: I've seen them. But I'll keep
The promise raised against your early death,
Your broken word: As long as I have breath,
Though elsewhere in the world you lie asleep

And cannot hear me name them, I will praise
The lovely lives of Earth, whatever dies.
Terns in the salt wind. Though I've sunk my eyes
To levels below light, though nothing stays,

I watch terns leaning on air. I'm here for a reason:
To speak truth with dry breath, to cry love
In the salt wind on this beach, in shame and grief,
To cry love in the blank eyes of death, love, and again.

　

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