Our Vision
it
would seem then
that
only our vision is to fault
I’m
thinking of the way
we
stood together by the farm that day in Idaho
and
how you missed the white ongoing show
of two
Friesian horses on downtime in the fields
how
the female’s swanny neck was sloughing
off
every oyster of muscle threading the male’s shoulders
and
all this observable from where we loitered
illuminated,
as perfection is, by evening
later,
night-fire having seeped
down
under the ocean of the clouds,
I
asked you how you could have missed
those
horses in their quiet field, playing at love,
you
answered by asking me
where my eyes had been
when
the flowers of purple geraniums tipped
their
shady, satin heads on the fence-posts there
and
how the subtle air
played
too with their bodies
like
playing at love
it
would seem then
that
only our vision is to fault
that
all we need is to stop this hauling back and forth;
to
centre ourselves in the eye of the other
and
it’s only when pulling close to the beloved
that
the lover sees the white-fronted geese
that
ringed her garden as a child
only
when the beloved leans
on her
lover’s body that she senses, all at once,
the
spring-air through his boyhood window
I’ve
heard it called redemption, mercy, grace
and
yes
coming
together in this way is hard;
but
not impossible
tens-of-thousands
died at Nagasaki
they
say more are dying now; in the gentle
river-plains;
the hills and yellow cities of Iraq
and
yet the global military budget
has
reached 1.8
trillion dollars
there
has never been a better time
for
verification
for
me seeing things as you do
for
climbing, as Rumi says,
up and
down the pear tree
for
the eagle to seek, as Pawhuska says,
the
deepest blue of the sky
and
please, don’t misunderstand me
this
is not a wish
to see
things as the heavens see them,
though
partly that desire is there,
but
rather I want the man or woman
charged
with dropping the bomb to see
that
every threadbare scrap of earth is full
of a
thousand braces of Friesian horses
of
wire fences with no end;
laced
and interlocked sublimely
by
the inward spiralling lines
of purple geraniums
of purple geraniums