80

To Name a Bond

In the calm after sudden shock

always there repeats the deep vision

which a life lives out to be itself.

I see you too now in your own light

and recognize the bond between us,

the sometime victims

of a world gone mad in civil war.

One night I sat out near the moon,

looked back and saw it all, how it all was;

elected to come down again (one must agree)

and found this earth’s terrible beauty.

Knowledge can be terrible.

The mayfly, they say, can walk on water

though I have only seen it dark and glint

too quick for human watching

unless, of its own will, it stop and hover there,

curious of this other world

interpenetrant of its own.

But I have heard a fish, nibbling my toes cool

in the creek, murmur:

“Oh god if Fish, with Feet….”

It’s not the civil war that means,

but the feet of mayflies and of fish,

and our own feet that tread vacuum

as easily as concrete streets.

We are luminous.

We are our own light.