What the blackness in the
universal trench and shovel returns me to
is the blackness in myself, that earth clotted on
my tongue, mud plastered upon
my eyelids, God's stutter, an angel's broken wing, a book full of
lists of the dead who fell out of life like black water falling out of
my arms, how will I hang onto
my children? or cling to the table with
its pale profusions of flowers, and how
do the living ever answer the dead, their presence pouring out of
the radio and filling up the car?
                             once every heart
had its own village, and every village
had its own cemetery, and was it enough
to undress the body one knew so well and lower it into
the blackness of the ancient ocean that broke at the edge of
the forest, at the edge of the world, but now each of
us has put on the knowledge of God without
the power,
           each night my tiny hours fill up with
the names and the numbers of the
dead, and the old answers do not
answer, and yet I have no others,
so I throw what I am, a stone to shatter the lack
of reflection, a crumb of bread to break the waters,
pushed to the lack and labor of being, where I know nothing except
I love you and that too arrives with its sadness, a glass of black water
held by your hand that seems so full of light.

Rebecca Seiferle

>>>Miraculous Hand

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