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.