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Towards You


ISSUE:  Summer 2002

What to Me is the multitude of your sacrifices?

—Isaiah I: 11

The innateness of the longing for relation is apparent even in the earliest and dimmest stage.

—Martin Buber

The petals of the dogwood trees are an inflamed guilty
pink. Aztec April, with a blissfully lucid knife, is
sacrificing our hearts. We are being ruthlessly sweetened,
and unkilled by a murderer. We are the victims of
 resurrection.

So I seek you as though barbaric shame were a
breeze almost too light to feel—the faintly stinging fringes
of a thrilling inconceivably touchable goodness, the justice
of the distant perfume of absolute mercy. You will forgive
me as we forgive the dropped forsaken newspaper which
vindictively traps our ambushed eyes: its stiff glyphs
intone the crimes of our bewitched or assailed families,
whose guilt makes us guilty and for whom we frantically
fantasize many atonements. Your refusal of my shackled
poems assassinates my amnesia. I want what I suffer to
remember. I hold that synesthesia at last replaces sin.
Death is just inattentiveness.

There may be no resistence to this day’s vividness.
Clarity must complete our sacrifice. The naked sun in
his feathered cloak exults over us like a painted priest-king.
Light swells the redness of the azaleas. Perhaps I
may slouch into ecstasy wounded and open because of
your “No!”

Because my sleepy pleas are dying.

Because I am weeping.

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