Mild Dry Lines: An Exchange
—You prick too liberal into alien pains,
and read too readily a grief you need to see
in order for the world to be the world
that ratifies the choices you’ve made.
You talk of callings, but a calling should
enlarge the life that it refines,
not grind its spice into some same mustard.
—If we could see the grief of any one life
it would be slag enough to crust a world
and any feeling being buried within.
But grief’s a craft like any other, it seems,
if only indirectly ours:
our skin’s inscripted with what nature knows.
The dead child chiseled in that woman’s cheek,
the battle smoldering off that old man’s brow,
our very mirrors, friend, these aging faces
with their lines of loneliness like pressured ice:
you would have them silenced?
—I would have them whole.
—As would I. As would anyone
whose life is lit, however dimly, by the light
of survival.
—I fear that by survival what you mean
is resignation, or, worse, a fictioned oblivion,
like the bull elephant that has outgrown
the stake that it was tied to as a calf:
it can’t break the rope that it could break
with ease.
—And I fear by wholeness what you mean
is merely the will to leaven fate with will,
that constipated sorrow called good cheer.
I won’t relapse from these mild dry lines
whose only consolation is their dryness,
that one might utter calmly utter blood.
