I hear a poem

I hear a poem

And I weep.

Even when it is

my own voice reading

a poem aloud,

I hear its sound, and

I weep.

I have felt, often,

there must be a poem for

every one of

my many heartstrings.

I have not yet found the limit

to my stanza-by-stanza

unraveling. Perhaps

I am made up of

more than I thought.

I hear a poem,

and I think I’ve found

in my frame where the

organ of my spirit sits.

It’s somewhere there

with those heartstrings,

constantly unweaving,

faithfully

holding me together.

It is a shout

and it is a sigh

and it is a tearful

sweet lady listening

to a song she’d

loved long ago.

Tell me, how do I

hold all that din

so quietly between the

bones in my chest?

I hear a poem, and I

feel my limbs

surrender

to all the things about

being human

that my hands

cannot control:

time, seasons, gravity,

space, mortality;

how my own hourglass

betrays me, teaching me

desire that is infinite but

having not the endurance

to take me much past

eighty-if-I’m-lucky years old;

how death finally

means something to me

now that this body

and everything in it

has been

held by a woman

I love.