The things you said were said so perfectly
at times, sometimes I feel like Porphyry,
devoted one fed by your rarified thoughts.
All that’s real is spiritual, so you sought
to split the barrier between degrees

of being. You wanted union with the One,
were said to attain this end on four occasions.
Fountain the soul can rise toward illustrates
the things you said

about the One’s good spreading, and man akin to it,
emanation and return. This doctrine
glossed the Trinity, and to thank you I submit
these lines, which being ex nihilo shine
divinely beyond Nature, or so I interpret
the things you said.

Birds graze the tassels,
sparrowing actually, or mocking,
their colors worth
nothing unless I pin
their wings
in the field.
Speaking of field:
the Russians say
life is a walk across an open one
where mules are buried,
and men.
The soil remembers
a forest that marched right through.
In time-lapse.
In the filtered light
a camera peels from wheat.
I see soldiers’ hands, too,
grazing the tassels.
If you think you’re here
with me, feeling the field
on you, chained to it
like a peasant,
aging like good wine and cheese,
you are.
Having noticed the sparrows,
you notice the flies.
Having heard a bell,
you see some cows,
together on an upland slope.

There, where stones populate
the underneath, splay
rain as it blends & stops
being rain, raises the river,
water into water, stone
into soil, too slick to stand
or walk, too wide to freeze
or span, to cross you must
swim, the current a visible
instance of movement:
you’d enter the water here &
if not pulled under
would emerge so far down-
stream the crossing’d require
another journey entirely,
on foot, over uncertain terrain,
over what, through ownership,
through deed, is called property,
thus encroachment, thus trespass.
The mind, though, can cross,
along with the eye (where it can see).
The body, my dear, counts for
so little — nothing, really — here.

So we’ve moved out of the years.
I am finally back upstream
and, but for their holiday grins
on every bookcase, the boys
were never born, it was a dream.
Here is where my past begins

in a garret beside a bridge,
woken by birds pecking moss
from the dark. The river’s clear.
It will not turn to sludge
till it reaches you and the mess
of streets I hated, endured

only because you were there.
My windows are full of leaves.
There are mountains in my skylight.
Perhaps you would like it here.
It is the same river—it moves,
perhaps, towards the same light.

If you were there when I woke
With my barbed wire, with my scars
You would avert your green gaze
I would feel the chill of regret.

Though you said something else
In sunlight, over wine.

I saw a cross on a tall rock
And a black boat danced on light
Someone waved, was it you,
A brown arm between white sails.

Old women know
That more go away
Than will ever return
Than the morning has scars.

In the wind as it blows
Wet sand against the panes
On the water that sings
In the fire as it dies
In blue sheets warmed by
Someone sleeping alone
On an empty park bench
When they lock up the square
You are still there

Brown arm green gaze black boat blown sand barbed wire.

There was also a church in the city made of stone. We stood outside it.
My grandmother adjusted her stockings. Spring had come to Philadelphia.
Maybe it was Easter. I remember the blossoms, how comfortable everything seemed
and the distance between her experience and my own.

Sometimes I see certain fonts on the signs of old buildings
and they make me think about the 1920s, the stories my grandmother told
of Irish and black children, playing together until they were told to stop.
We would make doll beds out of cigar boxes and pull them along the street.
I should have been her friend, not her predecessor. It’s too much pressure.
No one can be as great as one who was great.

Years may pass, I will meet you in an alley.
I will meet you in a subway station in the middle of the night.
I will meet you in the springtime on a crowded street,
the street will smell like peanuts and fresh cement, I will meet you
wearing a black jacket, I will meet you not having forgotten
anything and when someone on the opposite corner
takes a photo of the virtuous city we will be the two blurry
sentient beings in the background without words.

The Atlantic stretches out like a rippled gray quilt
stung by patches of wrinkled tin foil
until the whole sea shifts into a shimmer,

interrupted only by the dull echoes of clouds.

It’s all a matter of the way the light hits—

and the light hits the clouds like they’re canyons
of billowed, piled gray and it streams
through in a rain of orange

that goes on for miles and pools into swirls of ornament

across the dark water and the silver wing

of the plane and a glass of tequila
in the stylish cafe where I get for a long time to study
the face of a woman I’ve thought of as

rival. Her eyes now register kindness.
I see her soften and the fear I have carried

melts as silently as ice in the orange-tinged

glass as if there were never meant to be any effort

and it is easy, it is simple and it is almost not sad
to have to accept the sea change in this light
as I prepare to walk through the next few months

like a mirror reflecting everyone I see

in a blank, flat shine.

TIGERS
by Eliza Grizwold

What are we now but voices
who promise each other
a life neither one can deliver,
not for lack of wanting
but wanting can’t make it so.
We cling to a vine
at the cliff’s edge.
There are tigers above
and below. Let us love
one another and let go.