The idea that everything is sacrificed to something.
Day after day, this being repeated.
The idea that some things are sacrificed
to vaguer forms
and your job to keep asking where suffering comes from
while you send the children off to school—
between the cries of the hermit thrush
(the ‘pay, pay’)—
carrying their backpacks full of too much stuff
books imagined to be full of strong color, but now
pulling down to make their backs too straight.
And, never mind,
says one thing in this early migration,
the warbler in the rich person’s cypress,
never mind, say the pairs, what we create;
first there was brightness,
then it suffered;
suffering invented shape.
Remember how they taught you to stand
in front of objects? Early on,
in mild cities filled with vanilla, with extra dust,
with curvature; people
had begun to find pulsars at the edge of the universe,
drops of smooth shininess,
—like finding the seeds in an orange—
then they took you to see the huge Christ on the hill,
the god made of broken granite,
and oh how he leaned forward,
you could see it hurt him too,
to be trapped in somethingness, in those tiny mosaics with no blood,
rock eyes without eyelids
and you could offer him only your ability to change
like one of those fast terrified pigeons
that sped to his outstretched arms
and landed, flapping eternally their brief difference,
don’t make us, lord, don’t make us be like you—