Tonight the artificial light
is clearly driven by the beginning—
the furnace blast, carbon
caught fire, metals, molten
and poured into iron ore—
conflagration at the essential core.
It was easy before.
The simple divide between day and
night, coupling in heat on top of
the wild earth, under the dome of sky
while seeds fell from the new trees:
we lay across the green world
in the fragrant grass.
And it was good.
And when did love begin?
On that first day, delivered from the dust, inhaled
at one with the breath of life?
No matter.
At any rate, it spread.
Until the moment of exposure at the high altar
with the plunge into the chest
and the heart pulled, held skyward, beating:
the locus of love for all to see.
And now, songs of loss
leak across the face of each and every one,
the sheets of music all the same
save the nightly notations of empty bars
filled with the sound of leaving—
the endless echo in the inner ear
of a dead-bolt thrown behind a door.
Were the gods pleased, appeased
by the offerings? No telling.
How I must seem, seen from the heavens:
love-struck, dumb-founded.
Still, perhaps for a moment
they have seen me—
freshly-fractured, luminous in the light,
and they cannot turn away—
agog for once in their never-ending lives,
startled at my luster.
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