I am slowly absorbing a poem which arrived in my inbox last Friday:
One’s nakedness is very slow.
One calls to it, one wastes one’s sympathy.
Comparison, too, is very slow.
Where is the past?
I sense that we should keep this coming.
Something like joy rivulets along the sand.
I insists that we “go in.” We go in.
One cannot keep all of it. What is enough
of it. And keep?-I am being swept away-
what is keep? A waking good.
Visibility blocking the view.
Although we associate the manifest with kindness.
The way it goes where it goes, slight downslope.
Like the word “suddenly,” the incline it causes.
Also the eye’s wild joy sucked down the slope the minutes wave by wave
pack down and slick.
The journey-some journey-visits one.
The journey-some journey-visits me.
Then this downslope once again.
And how it makes what happens
always more heavily
laden, this self only able to sink (albeit also lifting
as in a
sudden draught) into the future. Our future. Where everyone
is patient. Where all the sentences come to complete themselves.
Where what wants to be human still won’t show
its face.
(from The Taken Down God by Jorie Graham, published this month by Carcanet.)