If You Love That Lady

We were, I thought, as Karl Barth
        	said about Mozart’s music,
 
drawing weight and significance
from the yes at our center
 
that overpowered and contained a no.
A bow rubbed against an ancient string.
 
Thunder caught between atmosphere
        	and earth, windows struck by heaven’s anvil.
 
Sleeping swifts mistaken for angels
in early radar before the sight grew sharp.
        	
I couldn’t tell pain from aliveness
is the truth, since all desire came
 
at once so close, I was there
before I knew where I’d arrived.
 
        	*
 
No reason could unseat him
for a time, nothing so slight
 
as what was actual. I suffered
the fact like one who cannot
 
make good with life but spins
continually on a top of doubt.
 
Like Ivor Gurney longing
for the spinnies of the Cotswolds
 
before the jingle of an ice cream truck
through evening rain, the formal
 
feeling after great pain, confused
sunlight thickening the shadows.
 
Like asking is my verse alive
and waiting leaden days for the reply.
 
*
 
Something like the grand scramble
for the Sandwich Islands, amphibious
 
and unprofessed, these vows passed
from hand to hand to me, a daisy chain
 
of longing. What you remembered best
was the reporter’s voice climbing
 
an octave as he entered deeper water.
        	Waves slapping against an early headset
        	
as the British ships neared North Arm.
        	Historians will have to invent
 
a new word for this love, you’d said.
We’d been talking about the war.
 
*
 
        	I’d thought I’d trapped my suffering in amber,
but was the boy perennially falling from a ladder.
        	
Clumsy Elpenor, so different from the story’s
protagonist, bombed on lotus or deep
 
inside the darkness of a nymph. I knew it,
didn’t I, the future’s charge, its choices
 
made impossible the longer they weren’t made.
The trick was never to forget that what the gods
 
coveted was the pain they caused the mortals—
was to be mortal. I merely wanted what
 
we’d promised one another, which broke
our promises to others in the promising,
 
until I seemed, at last, even to myself,
the perfect picture of the Trojan youth,
 
naked but for the spear pointed at the belly,
the future patient in his assailant’s arm.
 
        	*
        	For passion will the mind turn
on its diet of certainties
 
to tango doubt’s perimeter. 
I was the last lamplighter
 
lighting the final gas lamp,
our life ongoing in a snow globe
 
that could not snow elsewhere,
though the whole world
 
trembled for a time.