THE BROKEN HYMNAL

You stand against bright fibers
to become a dark
step against the darkness
to become a light.

This is why
men beg to be let into love
and out of life
or to be poured into life
and out of love.

There has been
too much mortal hatred
expressed with tenderness
or expressed with bread;
it might as well present itself
as a mollusk sized like a galaxy
or the ugly shoe of a child
who's just now left the building
in which we stand
like a frozen clan
refusing to weep or waver.

That is why
today I wear the face
of a gravedigger
who has failed
to cover the faces of his familiars
with the ample dust of neutral earth
and I weep
for my cruelties
for the ones who touched
an air train on fire
while I sped by
in the godlike blindness
of an engine room.

You who have reached us
by erasing jungles
you who telephone telephones
don't tell us your name
this time. I beg:
let us escape
the thin hurt
and the landscape
that this language
has created: teach us to wither
like old belts of star
or lit by falling speak
the brickwork of bodies
vapors lent by love
and, very merely
the forgetfulness that remembers.