1
Light diffusing icicles in rain
minor melody dripping in plain sight
mist effusion, this arresting pain
felt-for meaning in an empty rite
incense of memory, forgotten clotted air
in this mockery of spring, this rotten-blossomed pear.
2
O, those days, we thought we were a pair.
Two true gods in love, over love to reign.
Witness this: even true divinity can err.
Consider this: the text of any poem you could cite,
the text of any lines that you could write:
attention getting stones to rock a windowpane.
3
And in the silence, nothing but to pay, and
yet if nothing’s left, for what am I the payer?
So is it so that that that is is right?
No would be a hauling on the rein.
So let it go, yes, let yes take you to the site
Of all this dripping sorrow ere
4
brown unbudding branches are the all the heir
gets; the basses of the air groan out in pain
whatever litany of dripping words you may recite—
unless the heated blade of song can pare
the ice of loss into sounding rain
or modulate the melody as would a gilded wright
5
to make the magic of the song that can the wrong aright,
inscribed in drops upon the fabric air.
If all things end, so ends the fleeting reign:
so let the melting music swell a paean
and let the rotten blossom yield a pear.
Compensatory wisdom, flowering insight
6
some phrasal consolation to recite
some recollected truth within the rotten rite
like a child’s lost lesson from the dead old pere.
If sorrow is the death of love, the heir’s
Inheritance must just be the pain.
Then let the dead tree live in all this rain.
Envoie
Melting ice’s tears, the smell of blooming pear
within the sigh to know the right of pain:
let go the rein in incense sounding air.
