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I keep telling myself I should be
happy, my house
is full of roses, the full-scented
throats
of the yellow ones on the counter,
the bright
sunrises over the table, and even,
in front
of the house, every plant blooming
as if
it had been brushed by the rain of
the miraculous
hand, and even the unusual chill
of the wind
at night seems to make the roses
thrive,
and I think, I think that I
am
loved, but I drink each
morning
from the cup of
trembling;
I can hardly move with
remembering,
and when I lie down, I see that
rabbit
frozen in that ancient field
ringed by dogs, caught in the open
past the cattails of the swamp,
surprised
on that most lovely of mornings,
its body
already full of the dark cold
current
of the
underworld.
O merciless belief born in a month
of snow, out of the coldest
waters of what is
stillborn,
that burns hell in a child's heel, and
brands
a being with the birthmark of
another world.
In the motherless dark, I
tried to imagine my way back
to life--the worm upon the
greenest leaf, the rain falling in a field--
and thought of you as if I
could be brought back
to life by thinking
that my ear rested quietly
against the heartbeat
in your chest, as my infant
ear
once rested on my
grandmother's breast, as my child's ear
pressed against the earth, or even
as my ear that longed for death
listened to the snow. Some
part of me, all hearing
listening to the words
you say, all hearting
to
who you are, so I drifted back
into this room
where the fire in the candle of
the miraculous hand
had burnt all the way down to the
wrist,
so that the fingers and the
palm with its cunt-like wound
were illuminated
by the brightness of what I
felt for you,
and the divine is
whatever calls us into
being.
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Miraculous Hand