Glosses on texts by William Desmond
Low barometer.
My window seat on Broad is
shared with a black fly.
I watch passersby.
Umbrellas ready, hoodies.
All feel the difference.
Terrible things hap-
pen without warning these days.
The human weather
has no science; hope
is necessary; and the
bad guys call the shots.
Real evil is mo-
notonous, said Weil; real good
intoxicating.
High summer. Can it
go any higher? Tree tops
birdless all after-
noon. Crickets waiting
for the cooling hour, sex and
death in the hedges.
We are in it to-
gether, man and woman, long
looks over iced tea,
unwilling, unab-
le to say the words of love
as the tide goes out.
Now the USA
has its own Troubles, I re-
read Heaney, the prose.
Slaughter of children,
Gays, Jews, Blacks, Browns, Muslims: God!
So damn specific.
The brutal longing
to belong to something more
than your white trash self.
The bitter fruit of
our history. Heaney says
inwardness matters.
In other words, he’s
not talking. Well, he’s dead, too.
But for the poems.
It seems each time I
return home in the dark there’s
another cricket
in the hedge. Summer
wanes and the urgency grows.
The sudden coolness
of contingency
reveals the shadow of the
nothingness we share.
It sheds joy, this sense
of origin, the salt taste
of this sheer onceness.
My master knows no-
thing. I gaze at him and see
nothing, his mind un-
moving and unmoved.
My self selves many others,
but not him, no way.
He meditates, he
says. Keeping all things open
between us, I blink.
On a cool bright day
a smart lady walks down Broad.
She’s wearing Gucci
shoes, and I think of
you. Gucci shoes, Gucci shoes,
you loved your Gucci
shoes. Rome, Paris, Bath,
black patent Gucci shoes. In
later years you leaned
on me, and I did
too much admire your pretty
feet in Gucci shoes.
I sit in the win-
dow space just watching the sun
rising through the trees.
Birds flicker, being
and nonbeing in my eyes.
It’s not nothing, O-
rigin. It takes my
steady gaze to see the whole
that is and isn’t.
The birds flicker. The
whole flickers open to not
having been at all.
My master sleeps. Walk-
ing on the wind can’t compare
to riding the curve.
