and then our exile

we must die because we have known them
- rilke

i have been rereading david manicom these days, inbetween adjusting to the harsh and granular quality of time. "the slow gathering-in of days."

--

the title poem from The Older Graces:

"The words are aching in their own pursuit"
- Derek Mahon

Having lived in heaven I am here,
A hooded man, my fingers singing Where
In tenor light, a casting into air
From tree to island tree. To pure warp
Of harpstrings I imagined weft, the weir
Of lifted water, fishnet, am left here

Wandering the trout and dogwood forest
As our village is enlightened by the bombs;
Searching hooded for your silence, nest
Of last year's laying, the calm sad icon
Of your mouth. The children stay with nanna
In another place and year, my banished grace.

Having lived imprisoned in a hollow trunk
While winter soldiers barked and hunted work
You are here, cold beneath a shawl of leaves;
Your hair by now enwraps you like a cloak
Our tasteful furies tore away, muting the low
Music of the hooded man love half conceives.

--

excerpted from "Still Life":

hoping they have not insinuated love
(although this would never be a lie it would
be cruelty), and the doorway framing this,
every movement, every thought in brackets.
You thought now, at least, would pierce the skin.
Everything can be lost. You know you must feel
something, even the certainty of mistake
(what you feel is that you can feel nothing,
perhaps--this is not romance--you will never
feel exactly anything again),
you have become pears, a cup of water,
the sighing ease of swallows curving dusk,
perfect tangents, the caught fluid of Bach.
How can you possibly speak or move?