The daily digest of Twin Cities culture | Secrets of the City

For the Greeks, who had no word for irreversible death, one did
not die, one darkened.
—Mark Strand

Where the Japanese iris right
now stand ready to
accept the inevitable
purple blossom

she found four dead mice
in their nest of dirt and dusty fur
all with their small ears pointed like pilgrims
toward the trunk of the huge cottonwood.

 

Your wife had left you post-diagnosis

yet here you were this night stumbling on fire

with dance and blood,

a retired high school Spanish teacher,

now learning the new syntax

of multiple sclerosis.

It burned from your hands and feet,

the castanets, the dark mole

on the flamenco dancer's cheek,

All the broken stomping, clapping,

duende of dark.

 

We stumbled into the lighted lobby

where you grabbed my friend and me,

To lose an oak
is no heartbreak.
—No,
but to see them go
by the acre,
at a stroke,
is enough to
crack a man open,
the heart not broken
so much as stricken,
torqued at the root
and left in a thick
choke of ache.
Just so,
a whole forest's
felling will take
faith's poorest
dwelling down and
leave the chimney—
stark
in an open space
—like a brick
marker indicating
a once good place.

 

 

 

I have seen the sun break through

 

to illuminate a small field

for a while, and gone my way

and forgotten it. But that was the pearl

of great price, the one field that had

treasure in it. I realize now

that I must give all that I have

to possess it. Life is not hurrying