Elegy Owed Read Online Free PDF Page B

hotels after crossing
    a famous bridge. Trying to save for college
    and not hit their children like they were hit
    and not hit their children differently
    than they were hit and failing and succeeding.
    People are singing to wombs and playing the Goldberg
    variations to fetuses who’ll love Glenn Gould
    without knowing who Glenn Gould is. I’m driving
    along or painting a board or wondering
    if we love animals because we can’t talk with them
    more intimately than we can’t talk with God
    and the whole time there’s this background hum
    of sex and devotion and fear, people telling
    good-night stories or leaving their babies
    in dumpsters but mostly working hard
    to feed the future what it needs to grow strong
    and prefer sweet over sour, consonance
    to dissonance, to be the only creatures who notice
    the stars or at least use them metaphorically
    to go on and on about the longing we harbor
    in such tiny spaces relative to the extent
    of our dread that we’re in this alone.

Elegy to the time it takes to realize the futility of elegies

    Had I only dipped you in amber, only built an ark
    and filled it with one of your kind, only been God
    or a surgeon who was God or raised an army
    of fire ants and bulldozers at the door
    against what was coming, they say goldfish
    forget immediately the circled bowl, they say elephants
    come back to the bones of their dead and lift them
    with their trunks, I did none of these things, forget
    or lift your bones with my trunk, I like it here
    in the fog, being touched by the cool washcloth
    of the sky, had I only folded you into a triangle
    like a flag that has thrashed all day
    inside the monologue of the wind and needs to sleep,
    never letting you touch the ground, coming to you
    with my hand over my heart, pledging vibrancy
    and odors and sunspots, I’m sorry for the snot
    at the end, my face full of sheepshank knots
    and nails, had I only been an ocean for you,
    just a little one, a closet wide, a bedpan deep,
    plenty of infinity for your fuse, your hovering,
    the truth is I did all of these things, and let go
    the steering wheel on the highway until the rumble strip
    called me a dumbass, and chopped a tree down
    and built a crib for a child, I like it here
    when the fog erases itself and says, I offer you
    the world freshly painted, including the woods
    where you walked, if only I could weigh its shade,
    would it be larger or smaller by exactly
    the size of you, O science, give me such instruments
    of knowledge, they are as passionately useless as poems.

Love

    Lev and Svetlana are science students at Moscow University.
    They fall in love. World War II happens. Lev goes to war and is captured
    by the Germans. After the war, denounced by fellow Russians
    who heard him speaking German, Lev is sentenced to death for treason,
    his sentence commuted to ten years in the gulag. I am so far sorry
    for Lev and Svetlana but not amazed. My amazement begins when Svetlana
    breaks into the gulag, not once but several times, to see and touch Lev.
    I have lived for three weeks as a man who knows this thing was done,
    have washed dishes and dug a trench trying to imagine her first step
    after closing the door, the first step Svetlana took under the power
    of the thought, I am going to sneak into the gulag. I felt I knew the world
    and then found out it contained that first step and every next step
    toward guns and dogs and the Arctic Circle, it made me so happy
    that she did this that I dug a better trench and washed cleaner plates
    and tried to think of a place on my wife’s body I’d never kissed.
    I thought of such a place and kissed her there and explained
    why kissing her there was the least I could do to show the world
    I have a new and more generous understanding of life: I will get drunk
    and throw knives at clouds but also kiss my wife’s darkest privacy
    to demonstrate I am willing to convert reverence to deed.
    After I told my wife the story of Lev and