5 Afterwards

Storm

Depression comes in summer like a storm
that sweeps in unexpected,
building clouds that turn a day to night.

Deep darkness forms.

The next thing, lights go out.
You hear hail knock and think of crops and loss.

If you look out, you see the shape of trees
and how limbs toss, you think, like limbs in hell.

It’s just as well you have no eye for color.

Absent news, the house becomes a prison, faces shut
and white almost to death.

But these storms pass.

You see the track in limbs and wires down,
perhaps a treelike dragon on its back,

and wait for birds to sing.

The birds storm drown, in any case, are few.

Most birds survive and with each bird a song.
It would be wrong to think that birds don’t sing.

It’s what birds do.

Inside the Mountain

To live inside the mountain takes more care.
There’s darkness, always darkness.

Stairs are there, precipitous and steep, and places where
the stairs fall clean away.

Sometimes heat built up in ancient fissures causes steam
and seams of coal to burn.
It takes more grace than earnings,
faith than works,
to damp such fires down.

And sometimes dig out gold and precious gems
to bring up to the surface,
sewn in hems,
unpolished and uncut,
a thing we do to move beyond the boredom,
store up hope.

Or sit sometimes in darkness,
absent dew,
beside dark flowing rivers,
sit to smoke and listen to the silence,
earth’s stark prayer,
and presuppose the answer.

There’s the clunk of blunt machines,
and the dull drill’s roar
resounding in the walls
and, almost sore,
the strain on lungs to breathe.

Down here the score is always none to ten.
We find that more
is something less than less.
There is the stress of halls like hulls of ships
we pump to drain.

The simple lack of light makes sense of smell
and touch of more importance.
Here the ear
can feel as much as hear what we should know.
We’re bound by life to listen.

It is well to notice walls that tremble, air that glows,
direction to the exit
and the slow
pay out of breath like candy: buy or sell.

But more important, darkness and the fear
it gathers to itself and so preserves
creation like a book
left on a shelf,
the pages still uncut, the binding sealed.

It is by trust we’re healed,
by blindness cope down deep inside earth’s crust,
here care of hope is a habit
and also prayer.

Last Word

Renewal comes from sorrow, not from grief,
and grief is deferential, wends its way
the way a word repeats, the way a theme
comes back again in music or a tongue
returns to touch once more the aching gum.

That is the way with grief. It overcomes
by simple repetition, wears us down
and is worn out, not lost. Grief slowly yields,
becomes a part of the background. Grief backs down,
but never goes away.

Grief is unwound
like springs inside a clock. Grief hangs around,
a son’s unwanted friend, a daughter’s choice,
a voice no longer pressing. Grief is dumb
and, as such, is compelling; stands in line
and breaks the whole to parts while touching none.

We say grief is an orphan, has no home,
but houses in the heart. And grief repeats,
repeats and then repeats. It strings its beads
of onyx on a chain to stake its claim
to thoughtless repetition.

Grief retreats
in mirrors facing mirrors. What grief tests
is love and if love lasts. It’s love and grief
locked in domestic battle. Which outlasts
is hard to say: love grapples, grief holds on.
And so they sway as one,
this way and that.