from One Time

2. 2047 Grace Street

But the world is more often refuge

than evidence, comfort and covert

for the flinching will, rather than the sharp

particulate instants through which God's being burns

into ours. I say God and mean more

than the bright abyss that opens in that word.

I say world and mean less

than the abstract oblivion of atoms

out of which every intact thing emerges,

into which every intact thing finally goes.

I do not know how to come closer to God

except by standing where a world is ending

for one man. It is still dark,

and for an hour I have listened

to the breathing of the woman I love beyond

my ability to love. Praise to the pain

scalding us toward each other, the grief

beyond which, please God, she will live

and thrive. And praise to the light that is not

yet, the dawn in which one bird believes,

crying not as if there had been no night

but as if there were no night in which it had not been.