Spirit gives context, tortured by what inspires it.
Image can be understood as momentary summations
in a long process of accretion.
When I walked into the kitchen
She was standing naked, nickled in moonlight,
Stirring cups and cups of coffee.
“The tractor he was driving turned over,
crushed him against a tree.
Is this the way love dies.”
There is a release in tragedy,
A mourning that is rage never recanting
The magnitude of self or blind energy of its collapse.
They kept her under sedation several miles from here.
It remained simple or me to clean up the mess of coffee
And cups, but I didn’t.
I visited in the mornings,
Glanced at it in the evening
Like a Shrine of Cups.
Sometimes imagination cannot translate itself,
Is too astonished at its own disillusion and recognitions
That snap like static of crushed electricity.
Tonight, telling this story, my friend is afraid
Of whether I went to the kitchen for coffee,
To cry or drink or put my head in the sink
Where (it will be said) I broke glass and water,
Water all through my hair
Rinsing out the black and bitter.