Meanwhile

It’s as if you see him tearing wildly at his flesh
and cannot stop him making headway – shredding
skin and scraping bone – to try to break the bloody
cage that holds the heart – and while you see
him ripping his exterior, interior apart, you
flash on something oddly intimate, and calm,
detached and almost knowing: something glowing

like the light you look at every day: the light
right now, let’s say – that New York radiance, late
afternoon: this winter you have labored so hard
to convey – and flashing on this peace, as he
appears to tear himself to pieces, tells you
something’s going on – no, not in you, not just in
you, but deep somewhere within his own capacity

for psychic dawn. You have no place in his grand
violence; it’s not your business if it’s good or bad.
You’ve only come to guess that somewhere deep
inside the soul-lit cell of him, he’s working out
a private passage: clearing out whatever’s pulling
at him here and there, behind, below, above him.
Meanwhile, no one said you couldn’t love him.




.