It Is Sudden Only For Us

Don’t believe Nietzsche if

there’s a woman in your life.

If there’s a woman walking

untrailed—the wintered wood

breathes so soft it nearly bleeds,

under faces visible only by bare

dry death—why, even the elms,

the bones breathe,

she breathes.

We are not yet yonder; are we?

Decidedly unromantic,

this indistinguishability that

is the forbidden word—

Time (not yet forbidden) is

just different things dying all at once,

and again, and always.

Every momentous love-flurry,

snow-flutter, like a mist bright

with sunlight (oh, oh, be immune!):

that irreparable denial isn’t

for a Lover. How could such a

spirit be insubstantial?

To continue—move in and out

like Wordsworth watching phantoms,

versified, virtual. God is the

details in absentia,

God is the way she moves,

the way she prays down each

new-old river-creek,

the way she rambles.

It is sudden only for us.

Be nauseated, then! But this is

organic, orgasmic, swelling

like the only undying mist.

Yes. Life is a woman.

What a distinguished vocation—

the art of deconstruction, or

destruction; and it is rewarding, no?

To take the snow and furiously

fling it out and intuit

its continuum

(that moment was lost,

mis-remembered, mis-taught,

mis-took, and forgotten).

Man knows now better than

to explain love—

we invented poetry,

a sodden trenchcoat trailing,

tracking leaves like burrs, burrs

like overturned river-stones.

She treads in such a way

as cannot be held lightly.

and

In the—down by the river,

its cessation paramount—

dry detritus to be salvaged,

strainers like gnarled rib-cages

with leaves like fluttering flesh

to be found and caught and burned

on charred riverstones

on a bright windless night.

Even now: we are uncertain

if the stones left an indentation

or died and joined the sediment

—geology is always

an exercise in differential cognition.

Granite, sand, salt soon wither

and erode to forms of regret;

a colonnade of women by

the riverbed.

So when one licks and laughs

(like a flame), summons

in the primaveral wind and

she imbeds footprints on the

heaving forest floor—

don’t believe him,

don’t believe him,

they remain.