Grace, Fallen from. Marianne Boruch
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love. How is it
that time has
layers and layers,
some of which never move
or fill up. Meanwhile: a favorite word
any poem understands to be
snow’s most legendary suggestion.
The second: melt.
The third: I need to
freeze first.
STUDYING HISTORY
Not the underwater goggles to see
great distances, not the let’s pretend
of the museum’s “Street of Yesteryear,”
its candy’s single stripes in jars, life-sized
dummy at the counter,
stiff collar and apron, eyes skewed to retrieve
his blank good will. Nor is it
book after book of the same war
over remembered time, the old nun called it,
speeded up for the test. Wars of different
colors, weaves and counterweaves,
different surgical instruments, different
agonies via different
far-off blasts, different endlessly
pointless outcomes, different
tiny viruses ingesting
the lungs first, derailing trains there,
breath starting and stopping
at each smoky depot.
I sat at a desk
where we all sat. I opened
that book of flags. Once a woman took up
a whole half page, looming there,
middle of the 19th century, absolutely
glacial because happiness is momentary
and eternity is work, the camera
shrouded, laying
its slow black against white until her
terrible face found me.
Was that
childhood going on? That noise
in the background—half-starved, deranged bird,
half Hallelujah Chorus sung
by the whole town, bad tenors included? Ache
of cold metal on the playground,
one glove lost forever, night,
hours of it, caught
by a streetlight?
Which is simply
the past. In that book now, isn’t it?
And a child is writing
his name in the flyleaf, under two or three
other names, the book already underlined,
half-forgotten. Write clearly,
write in ink, the teacher is saying.
AFTER THE MOON
eclipsed itself, the rumor of darkness
true, the whole radiant business
almost over, only a line,
an edge, like some
stray part of a machine
not one of us
can figure any more:
what it thrashed or cut, what it sewed
quietly together, what it scalded
or brought back from the dead. After this,
I came inside to sleep.
But it’s the moon still,
pale run of it shaping
the door closed against the half-lit hall.
The eye is its own
small flicker orbiting under the lid
a few hours.
Not so long,
bright rim,
giving up its genius
briefly, mountains under dark, craters
where someone, then no one
is walking.
A MUSICAL IDEA
At the second light, you turn, the boy tells me.
I turn. A musical idea. Turn then,
when a light in any house goes on.
Dark end of the day on the street. Dark
late afternoon in November.
In any kitchen—revealed: the hum
starts in the freezer, down
the lower shelves, takes the stove back
to its fire. The sink is an absence,
one tea-stained cup left to seed.
I live somewhere. But to walk away
is a musical idea. Because a corner means
make a profile to however once
you were. Once a child, I kept turning
full-faced into everything, never
saying a word. You like
to think that, my brother says. I heard you
plenty of times. And you were hiding.
OMNISCIENCE
To shrink down and not be small
but just to see again, he said
of the past, the past as broken mirror,
as weird-looking stick
because this was the woods,
halfway through the hike.
To refrain from the cheesy, the self-serving, from
knowing too much. That voice,
his again. So there were rules. But how can we
know too much, she said. Memory,
she said, come on, it’s all about
forgetting. Think of the things
lost to make that box
of odds and ends. They
kept walking. Somewhere, a real road. They could
hear it. He almost told her,
you’ll test me now. You’ll ask me
how long did it take
to hold a pencil, to write the word
fabulous or maybe just dog
for the first time. And if he
shook