From Jorie Graham's Swarm

2/18/97

Of my life which I am supposed to give back.
Afterwards.
Having taken part in it.
Every now and then looking up at the moon to see how still.
Supposed to take in and then give back.
Of player of infinite joy.
As if we are inside, for a while.
Along with the gentle lawns of this earth of course.
A sudden rain sweeping the petals along.
And pebbles the rain won't move.
And these bodies someone has put before me.
And this body someone has put me within,
as if its completion,
told to cast spells--oh you know--a look,
the thing preceding you
you then must come upon,
and name--so suddenly.
Underneath, always, the soil that brightens and darkens.
Now refusing you. Later demanding.
But now, now made to live the life entire,
each day snapping shut its eye,
leaning out from the green to whisper--
you too will at last be
free of all trust--
learn the slope, lean into the open spaces, learn the slope,
say no one will take me back,
say I will keep what I have taken from this black earth,
and the sparrows landing, and the small dip of the branch,
and the last village on the highest ridge we came to,
children playing music on their knuckles,
feet skipping, dirt tossed around and then resettling on
________________________________their prints,

where dance steps are
for just a moment longer
___________visible--
the sure-footed already ahead of us on the high mountain pass,
and the great bird in his shelter the sky slowly circling,
and the peaks, up there, shoved up hard
into the weightlessness--
And the instant they are built up into,
and the gone instant, the vector...
A god is smiling in his sleep.
Imprisoned inside him the sleep is smiling in a beseeching
_________________________________solitude.
Inside the instant, inside the mind of the invented ones, our minds,
something like a small fragrance, blooming, so fast, straining and straining
__________________________________________to stay.

Let the loved glance open up and go, too.
Let it spill out and be taken back.
Let it be disavowed.
But let there be something mute left us that cannot go.
Like a god's mouth held shut.
An intake of breath a delay.
So that the everything, tempted, will push on us,
taking our whole freedom--
weeping too, in its small applause, to take us.
All the rest I swear given back whole.
Never again empowered.
Never again a thing that can come shaped
out of a mouth--the world
put in (have I already let it go) the world
taken back out. So rich now, the thoughtless again.
The pillars taken, the roof taken.
The light arch of my belief--
the clay of my space, of my redistribution.
Leave me the thing that will not burn.
Leave me the thing that cannot be thought--I will not
____________________________________think it.