Beginning with Two Lines from Kenneth Rexroth
       

I see the unwritten books, the unrecorded experiments, the unpainted
pictures, the interrupted lives, a staircase leading to a guarantee, the
glowing frame of wisdom protecting me from harm after I escape the
questions of a lifetime. I see the turning of the pages in a book I have
not read, its story proclaiming the reader is going to escape without
knowing how the equation injured the moment—sacred leaves rotting
in a bottle of rubbing oil, their black designs sinking farther than my
reach.

I witness what is made for someone else, its motion calling me to wait
for the regions of love where we come back, able to dismiss the picture
of ourselves where we can't smile because no one is able to capture time
that has not happened and never will. There is no agony and waste, only
the steps into the frontier where it is easy to hide.

Even a shoulder bone cracks in the morning light, a man rising at the
end of a century where everyone gives him pictures, including one of
a translucent scene where the running youth carries the host, his con-
fusion between danger and desire making the boy stop at the bank of
the river, turn, and go home. When he gets to the house, he doesn't cry
out. When it goes dark and the arguments begin, it is his portrait that is
handed to me first because I already arrived at the junction between the
lamp and the staircase to the mocking stars.

Copyright © 2009 Ray Gonzalez All rights reserved
from Cool Auditor
BOA Editions, Ltd.
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission