Is This a Definition of Mercy?

 

"Is this a definition 

of mercy?" she asked.

"Yes." he said.  "This

is a definition of mercy."

  

 

…Their ships have drifted away

They are stars, and snowflakes floating down

Into your hands, love.

                                           James Wright

                                           A Way to Make a Living

 

It’s too cloudy to make a view

of the moon worth searching for.

In a few hours, a flower is supposed

to pass over the shadow

or through the shadow, brief

where we plant our feet, briefly.  Maybe

 

by the time the eclipse is going

to start, the wind

will have blown enough of the puff

and rumple off and at least

one of us will see how the moon seems

to lean into darkness like a cheek easing

 

into a hand that’s on its way

down into it all once more, once, once more.

A hand that’s been around the world

and back

a hand that’s on its way

out into it all once more

but for this moment and for the full

 

duration of this moment will stay:

it will soothe and be soothed, cupped

into clouddark and then, pulling the shadow

with it, move slow,

deliberate as a magician, off stage

and away.  

After James Wright’s “To a Defeated Savior”

 

After James Wright’s “To a Defeated Savior” 

 

 

I was born on a day

when God was sick,

gravely.

                     Cesar Vallejo

                     Epexegesis

 

Maybe all along you wanted to go under

Water and breathe there instead

Like the fishes and their way

Of never having to come to

The surface unless their caught lip

Lifts them and they give in

To the fight.  Beneath

It all the hard world is

Abandoned and you are

Weightless and make the proper

Exchanges naturally: the weight

Of you in the near

Absolute absence

Of light (aside from what penetrates

From above in shafts) and

You teach yourself to read

The bends and intentions of

Such reflections.  You translate

With the best of them

The possibility of the sea

Scape’s eventual absolution

That fathoms baptisms from an absent

God so that the final hands

That reach for you are human again

And they pull you to the surface

And to reintroduce you to air, how it

Scorches in its fire-

Dry enlightenment and makes to

Abandon you if Goddamn you

You didn’t clutch at water 

With so much fucking might.