Surrender
Sweet sadness of surrender
when I know what you want
and you know what I want
and I’ve decided to give in
before you’re finished arguing.
I watch the thing coming
a mile away, and anticipate
your joy when it arrives.
At last when you fall silent
I get to offer you the gift.
To do so is a gift to me
as to anyone who loves.
Romance in Jerusalem 2
It’s where we go, and what we do when we get there, that tells us who we are.
—Joyce Carol Oates
There’s a big difference between
going away from the person you love and going to them.
And the whole world reflects this difference.
It can make the difference between Africa and Greece.
This is the first time I’ve had wine on a plane.
She said you can’t tell anything
about someone by what toppings they put on a sub.
I said except what toppings they would put on a sub.
She said she woke up mad this morning
because her memory of me is already crystallizing.
Ever since I swam in that damn spring
my phone’s been locking and unlocking with free will.
Today I was befuddled at the front desk
after returning my keys and Ivony’s.
It unlocked just long enough for me to call Caper.
Of course I did call her, because she’d called me
at six forty-five a.m.
She said a phone goodbye was not a real goodbye.
Neither, I neglected to point out,
was what we did last night.
So I invaded her while she brushed her teeth.
I thanked her for being half of Jerusalem
insofar as her claim on my memory.
It’s not a compliment, I said,
it’s just a deed.
I saw Ravenel a.k.a. Sandra at the airport.
From seven metres away we realized we had nothing to say.
And I watched them load my bags onto the plane,
like some postmortem soul-floating-up experience,
observed from inside a beautiful transparent snow.
The path we travel, sings Kristina, takes us away,
and never back.
Caper said leaving hurt her less than me
but what hurt was that it didn’t hurt.
In the morning she missed me more than she expected.
If you weren’t so damn intelligent
I’d say make sure you know what you are doing.
But you are intelligent,
and you know what you are doing,
and you know the risks involved.
Still, I had this advice to offer her:
if you want to get some crying done,
go up to apartment six nine one,
and contemplate the four closed doors.
You can look at them like you look at ruins.
No harm in that. And no harm will come to you,
not here, while the early sunlight settles through
the glass, and your glasses,
lands on our hands
and refuses even now to let the moment pass.
The spire
The spire turning in the air, describing like a compass’ arm
a burning circle, like a demon’s magic symbol in the sand
that, when complete, and with the right words whispered
in a language no one understands, will yield this end
for which we’ve laboured some two hundred years in light
that feeds on precious disappearing darkness: a world
of rust and flame in forest and on mountaintop: this spire,
now set up again, not as easily but with the same reward
the child feels when the knocked-down castle is rebuilt,
points upward, not to earth, because it ardently insists
that — pillage what we will — we are creators still,
Created; that the magic is not lost and past, the mystery
not gone out of the world, because it comes from elsewhere;
cathedrals, stone or not, will not outlast their makers,
the professions of their makers, being that they are eternal.
