Who knows god as well as lovers in the park? Everyone
listens. Everyone whispers. Even the rabbi pulls his beard. Beauty
is an experience so overwhelming, we sometimes never
recover, always wanting to see what remains veiled. Boundaries
and distinction keep us safe, but the chthonic pulls
like a drenched suburban lawn, porous, liminal, sucking my sandal.
Soaring in the air, I also necessarily experience the abyss
which is only part of my own flight. Similarly, I can speak of hell
only in relation to myself because I can never imagine
the possible damnation of another as more likely than my own,
but something rustles in the manicured verge, the tulips
dropping their rose-red. A man has lost his watch, What time
is left, he asks; I have no answer, Show me your beauty,
I want to say. Show me how you made this mask, the lichen, twigs,
the long tended griefs. What magic is there in that closed
fist, the rheumy eye, the bag that watch must have fallen from.
LAURA MCCULLOUGH’s books of poetry include Rigger Death & Hoist Another, Panic (winner of a Kinereth Gensler Award), Speech Acts, and What Men Want. She is editor of two anthologies, The Room and the World: Essays on the Poet Stephen Dunn (Syracuse University Press, 2013) and A Sense of Regard: Essays on Poetry and Race (University of Georgia Press, 2 014).
