103

After Our Roles Are Played

Addressing you now by your own name

I let the silver moon float free upon bright clouds

cradling that presence toward some next brooded need:

for when the night sky fails of stars,

for when the dark tide turns.

Nor is it grief to perceive again the shape of flesh,

the solid bones, the varied gestures

of your daily face, where Being turns visible

to the retina, human—that mystery more absolute

than Ceres enthroned with her seven sheaves

or Gilgamesh forever stirred toward epic enterprise.

Most now I prize the unseen primitive heart

that beats through sorrow on its battered drum,

draws all ambiguous spaces into the central dance

and masters the dark feet to hearable music.

Through images of all other days

it is your humanhood I praise.

And echoing angel laughter across that vacancy and void

beats my two ears

to a committed ambivalence.