a lifting

Hermitage

It’s true there were times when it was too much

and I slipped off in the first light or its last hour

and drove up through the crooked way of the valley

 

and swam out to those ruins on an island.

Blackbirds were the only music in the spruces,

and the stars, as they faded out, offered themselves to me

 

like glasses of water ringing by the empty linens of the dead.

When Delilah watched the dark hair of her lover

tumble, she did not shatter. When Abraham

 

relented, he did not relent.

Still, I would tell you of the humbling and the waking.

I would tell you of the wild hours of surrender,

 

when the river stripped the cove’s stones

from the margin and the blackbirds built

their strict songs in the high

 

pines, when the great nests swayed the lattice

of the branches, the moon’s brute music

touching them with fire.

 

And you, there, stranger in the sway

of it, what would you have done

there, in the ruins, when they rose

 

from you, when the burning wings

ascended, when the old ghosts

shook the music from your branches and the great lie

 

of your one sweet life was lifted?

-----Joseph Fasano

Done