If the mist that hides the Mississippi on this night
was to gather at my feet,
however clouded your face, I could not forget you.
A haze of blocks along the West Bank, and an onset
of blindness comes to be the air by which my memory has folded you.
I dared not dream of growing old with you;
but you linger like the cadence of a song I learned long
before I heard your voice at daybreak—
there must be some confusion in me of a place, because you remain
the only touch of freedom I embraced.
What would it have changed
if the thought of you had never taken me where walking couldn’t?
If behind glass we hid from wind, or
at the dock’s edge we shuddered in each other’s arms
from fear of falling in,
why do you move away when I lean in?
If all were but seen by you as clear, meaning water;
if life were but known by you as a path, meaning lake;
to the empty, which is us, who wish that our dreams were a message, meaning river.
There are three
to the South,
yet here we are convinced that no words have been left untouched
by our mouths—but I am sure we haven’t lapped these waters
to sanctify our doubts from here in the north,
where we have furnished
what we’ve found,
to the delta,
where the waters move back toward the land,
with sound.
Forgiveness is a constant prayer murmured long after we’ve received it—
played by the strings that compose us,
and washed away by the stretch of water that consoles us.
What error there is with these phantom towers—
or the lamplights that, at sunrise, turn off on Grand
to give a moment where everything is darker—
is they stand more stiff when everything is frozen.
And I thaw out in spring, along the stretch that I have chosen.