love exists, love exists
your hand a baby bird so obliviously tucked
into mine, and death impossible to remember,
impossible to remember how inalienable
life, as easily as chemicals drifting
over the knotgrass and rock doves, all of it
is lost, vanishing, impossible to remember that
there and there flocks of rootless
people, livestock, dogs exist, are vanishing;
tomatoes, olives vanishing, the brownish
women who harvest them, withering, vanishing,
while the ground is dusty with sickness, a powder
of berries and leaves, and the buds of the caper
are never gathered, pickled with salt
and eaten; but before they vanish, before we vanish, one evening we sit at the table with
a little bread, a few fish without cankers, and water
cleverly turned into water, one of
history’s thousands of war paths suddenly
crosses the living room, you get up, limits,
given limits exist, streets, oblivion
everywhere, but your hideout comes no nearer
see the moon is too brightly lit and Charles’s Wain
is going hack empty as it came; the dead want
to be carried, the sick want to be carried, the broken
pale soldiers looking like Narcissus want to
be carried; you wander around in such a strangely
endless way; only when they die do you stop
in a kale patch no one has tended for several
centuries, follow the sound of a dried-up
spring, somewhere in Karelia maybe, and as
you think of words like chromosomes and chimeras
and the aborted growth of lychees, fruits of love,
you peel off some tree bark and eat it