A. F. Moritz

Come, my body, leap up, while you still can,

onto my knees, into my lap. Come let me pet you,

comfort you and take comfort while there’s time,

while you last. How calm you are: content, it seems,

with your infirmity, your age, in the almost changeless

youth of your soft hide, your pelt and shy quiet,

expressionless as you huddle and crouch for this leap

you can still make, though it’s grown great, this petty

piece of your young and many springs.

Why did I never, body, cherish you enough?

Although I thought I was spending all my minted hours

on you, till I’d cry at the long waste of time, chained

by eyes and tongue, the ends of every extremity,

to your pleasure. Now I can’t recall ever once

kissing you, lying locked in you, deep as I want.

You’ll die, it won’t be long, body, swiftly

in animal nobility – how you wear your decline unnoticing,

the way a poor man walks in his only shirt to work –

and then, without you, in what mud of my own

making will I linger, falling apart? Purr now

and fuse your old pleasure into crotch of my torso,

palm of my hand, vision of eyes and sag of diaphragm

inseparably; they’re yours. Give me your indifference

that a once forest-wide range comes down

to couch and counter now, and this lap. Give me

your unrepentant having-known

a more-than-ant’s-intimacy with the grass,

a more-than-god’s-innocence in the hunt,

a greater-than-winged-agility in branches

and light. Leap up, body, while you still can,

let me finally hold you, feel you, close enough.

We found a jar there. Not a vase, not a piece of the potter’s art

but glass, from a store shelf, with a threaded mouth,

the lid and label long gone, all residue of the product blotted away:

bright crystal. I had to tell you this because the word jar

dwells in between comprehending both. It reminded us of songs we know,

the “broken water jar,” the “jar in Tennessee,” the “drinkin’ liquor

from an old fruit jar.” But the desolating place: white weeds,

white ground baked into sharp lumps and ridges,

a dead sapling, bushes crisp with thirst, rattling in a breeze.

No moisture in the jar. No way to tell if it had been thrown away

or washed or kept as a vessel. We succeeded for a while in seeing

the curves and sun-glints of its strange perfect hollow with affection.

We felt shaken, imprisoned, as though the low whine of the acres of flies,

as though the silence, were aftermath of a deafening shout. We longed

for wet darkness, even if it brought that doom-laden bird, the nightjar.

Thou poem of lost attention and half try,

do you fear more the inner world or outer?

I do not love the self less than the others,

my name is legion and my mouth one cry.

Thou poem of the unwell, of the dry well and doom,

and the snake’s on your lip, in you the toad persists.

Did we come here just to read of what exists?

I champ at my winter bit to be in bloom.

But what’s the difference between you, poem, and the flower?

Don’t both break from the compost as long as it may be?

You are the one who knows what metaphor

and imposes it. Two dandelions are not similar to me.

Thou song of all-powerful individuality,

if only I could rest in you escaping me…

You would never again be troubled by the nudity

of the mother, or the Heart Fall’s killing roar

as you slid toward it, catafalqued on the fluid

descents of a new old world, shrouded in greenwood.

Thou ignorant epic of half-knowing ever more,

thanks in thought’s ruin for reminding me.

I really did love you in a sense, colleagues,

friends and fellow citizens and passersby

of my day here, who stormed the smoking world,

struggling to plant your flags or at least be heard.

I looked at you with consistent and unfeigned

interest, delighted in the revelation

of your pointless variety. It was joy to know

myself a poet among so many who knew

it also, but kept it quiet – the one thing

you did keep quiet. So many males and females

of divers pretentions: fortified handmade heights

from which in rage and fear you each would look

downward at me and melt in love. And I

would melt too and would feel the sympathy

of living with you among the flowers and rocks,

and dream sometimes for long seconds on end

that all any of you wanted was blessèd life

for everyone, and me too. But she and I

clung to each other, comrades, and I understood

that you more truly were the storm, and though

the two of us are dead now, what we had

to do in life, in fact, was to survive you.