What You’ve Always Wanted You Have Found

Lightning flicks – a humming glimmer of midsummer –

dusk, as if dusk were a kind of musk, a scent, perfume –

more smelled than seen – the kind of trick the mind

plays when it conjures up from who-knows-what

an apparition of the dreamed-for – oh, the passionately

schemed-for!: sudden deluge of belief which surely,

psychically, you've rushed to pour as refuge and relief –

the momentary certainty that what you've always wanted

you have found. This is when the dusk becomes a sound –

a Mendelssohn slow movement from a string quartet:

rapturous and slightly odd – grace notes captured from

a minor god – brings senses just precisely to the juncture –

sweet intoxicating point – where they imagine they

have punctured through to something like a breathing,

jointed whole: a truth: a soul with corporeal muscle,

bone: companionable tone: voluptuous, ethereal – that

smell of dusk again: finally a habitable zone! Write

a book and fall in love, and in the framing of that miracle,

experience a joining of your disparate centralities –

below, above: dichotomies release and cease, and

you've the first sense in your life of an illumined peace.

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Fast-forward through the decades: fumble with the lock

and key to your now long-familiar door: stumble into

your bright-lit imbroglio of glaring middle-day – too clear

to miss this boon of noon – blaring out an enterprise

you can't dismiss, this mission whose demands you've

taken up, this antidote to easy bliss: yes: hard to strain

from all this blinding light alternatives to that soft

long-gone musk-besotted night: there are no books to write,

no love that you could possibly requite: a different order

in your living heart obtains. Losses, and peculiar gains.

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