THE TRUNK AND THE LOST LEAVES
THE TRUNK AND THE LOST LEAVES
The sharpest tension of all is that we live and die in the same fragile moment,
to know this and still remain whole and gentle — that is all of art and all its cost,
at the center of existence lies a pool of energy with no name and no personal face,
one that falls away from itself and dissolves into the natural universe like wax in fire.
Poems would be easy if the mind weren't so full of today's noise and clatter,
you have to get through to the other side — where the deep rhythms bind you to the stars,
where the tides knock against your temples with a precision older than language itself,
and I keep trying to control my words so I won't be forced to lie beautifully.
Our poems can never satisfy us — they are nothing but diminished echoes,
the shadow of a song we may have heard just once in the whole span of our lives,
and we spend all the rest of our days trying to remember that lost and vanished sound —
a song we aren't even sure we truly heard or only dreamed somewhere in the past.
We have all been expelled from the Garden — but those who suffer most in exile
are those who are still permitted to dream of the perfection they can never reach,
a badly made thing falls apart — its energy leaks out within just a few short years,
form is the function of conservation — what cannot hold together dissolves into nothing.
Under the surface of my poems there is always a song that wants to take over,
incantation needs no language — it needs nothing but sound and a little darkness,
and sense struggles to assert itself, to mount the rhythm and become inseparable from it —
this struggle is all of poetry — a gentle war between magic and clear-eyed truth.
I want poems that are natural, luminous, deep, simple as the breath of early morning,
I dream of an art so transparent you can look straight through it and see the real world —
what remains after all the anxieties of youth are the great simplicities of living:
birdsong, sky, and weather — the trunk stays solid while the leaves drift and float away.
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