The losses, the nectar there: Blood, taken up,
Is passed
to
us with such serenity. "Serenity!"
But it was because we broke him between us like bread.
Because "more human" was a healing-being-woundedness,
Not human enough, not a gladness fleshed.
The faun gazing on wine
Leaps away from us. We were running now for the last hill,
The rumpled gold mess we called a bed.
And will I raise the wet walls
Whitewashed over us, and the long red beams? Will he
Keep the door open as the flowers open
Which is not long? This will be the wonder of experience:
What we found was more than we were left on the hill.
JAY ROGOFF
Captivity
in
Spring
The robin's cyclical ruckus,
its helical whistle
like a spiraling molecule,
tenses in spring
to
knock us
out of our jeans. Gets hard to focus
on the world at hand-rather,
in my hand: old photograph
that captures half your life
for me, fixed by the shutter–
click-you're now fifteen, before
the correct blocks of your school,
before a quarter century
unspools, replicated like the rusty
gate of the blue jay's bray
now topping the robin's wrangle.
