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We are a public forum committed to collective reasoning and the imagination of a more just world. Join today to help us keep the discussion of ideas free and open to everyone, and enjoy member benefits like our quarterly books.
Once I swore grief was the same distance
from lament as joy from praise, the same
that stretched a pillow’s wing at night, a space
I’d never close completely, I’d never lose.
You know the feeling, I’m sure: the hymn
that tends the fire inside it, that keeps it safe.
But if songs are bridges to a world in flames,
don’t bridges too catch fire. I want to believe
there is more pleasure in songs of loss
than loss in any song that pleases. But then
who could lose oneself inside a song
that never dies. One day our grieving turns
to lament the way a widow turns to her
remaining child. Is happiness any less
the widow, any less the mother who sees
herself in the one she prays she won’t
survive. One day a mother’s elegy turns
back to joy to say, don’t I know you.
Another life, perhaps. Another sun
burns its arc in the slow zero of praise
we live inside, the one that lives, keeping
its vital distance. Perhaps we see praise
in the inconsolable eyes of the living.
Seeing itself is distance. And what is praise
without seeing. What are songs without
a shape that silence gives them. See that cat
who knows less of praise than the joy
that knows no joy. I love that cat. See
the birds who, or so the songs imagine,
lament our laments, though we know
better, seeing and not seeing. Like nothing
the zeroes of these eyes, these wings.
Bruce Bond is the author of twenty books including Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997–2015 and Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand. Five books are forthcoming: Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods, Frankenstein’s Children, Dear Reader, Scar: A Trilogy, and Words Written Against the Walls of the City (LSU). Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at University of North Texas.
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