Every Occasion

I

Given to me, as if I were the one to be trusted, these:

bluejay that sweeps continually and stilled
across a credible dogwood steeped in white-
named image of a minute kept from May

caught also, out of compassion, out of a pure act,
the true air
that rustles on the other side of a screen
the night of my infidelity

The loved night air-how given again
when I myself can scarcely tell
for love of the palpable tongue, sweet English,
my meaning?
The language joins and sunders
as much as marriage.

II

Yet every occasion is the possible occasion
for meeting each other, receiving-
not arguments, not celebrations,
not things or times I chose-those I forgot-
but those that have chosen me to perceive them:

the woodland floor where sticky green pine cones dropped
not to seed-to needled shade
and the weedy flowers of August
a field of high goldenrod I lay down in before I was five
back to the whirled earth, face to the mounting azure.

But more than that. Listen! The sound!
Notes easy for gods struck from the splendid instrument
in large arcs over and over, outbeating our nearness.
Such opulence gives us each other
as we bend inward, attending,
answering the violence of the distracted air,
collisions of song outreaching ourselves
each note articulate in the warm disturbing stream,
discrete even as hailstones, rain drops, water drops, onne, one

or equal, hand by mortal hand held,
warm fist interfolded with separate curving fingers,
locked charity borne inward,
human love.

　

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