Love's Last Number - Christopher Howell

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the hours of supplication

      and grace?

      She is far from me now, a speck

      rising and dipping on the dazzle,

      on a glinting of green trumpets that call

      and call as Mahler drifts past

      in a clef-shaped canoe and I toss him

      a story in which a man dreams himself

      beyond thought, beyond the farthest

      point of land, where what he loves

      has left him widened and cloudy,

      the great sky somehow come

      into his broken-fingered notation

      turning slowly all night, lifting

      as I do, waving to her, imploring

      the angels to open themselves,

      tune their instruments and pretend

      that he is one of them, or they

      more of him than he can count.

      CROSSING JORDAN

      Having eaten the chickens, dogs, cattle, horses, our belts,

      leather vests, and shoes, we came at last to the river,

      great silver-blue spillage carving its monument and grave

      in the endless grass.

      We fell face down and drank, a writhing stillness

      filling us like lust

      or the sort of prayer they don’t

      teach you.

      Leaves revolved on the stream like golden boats, carelessly adrift,

      open to the sky that seemed to be watching as we herded small fish

      into the shallows and ate them alive

      and squirming.

      Later we made fire in the shadow of a cutbank

      and slept and rose and ate and drank again and slept

      and on the third day

      we rose

      as our Lord, to whom we had prayed all the way from St. Joe

      and who had indeed delivered us

      so that we thought the far shore surely must flow with milk

      and something sweet.

      So we made our crossing, the stream being wide but shallow.

      Only one nine-year-old boy broke the human chain and so

      was swept away.

      Brother Jacoby said it was what God and the river required

      by way of sacrifice, and the boy’s father went for him with a knife.

      Thus discord came upon us and a taint

      upon the new land

      so that some of us longed for our lives as they had been

      before we dared to cross the glinting vein, before

      we dared the Lord to give us

      everything.

      But, finally, with the river at our backs it seemed wrong

      to think of this.

      Praise the Lord and his angels, we said, when we buried the torn

      and bloated boy,

      who had reached down with both hands for something bright

      in the water.

      BUT BEFORE THAT

      we lay awake all night, dreams thickening

      like hair in the cold branches

      and ready to descend, ready to know

      what had become and what would be.

      She said, “I thought just now an owl

      flew out of me, an emerald being, a species

      of moon.”

      And I said, “Sometimes.”

      It was so cold we grew afraid of a warmth

      that moved in the woods nearby, beginning

      to curl toward us like a smile.

      So we prayed and the sun came up with not

      a single barnyard crowing, not one worried dog.

      We ate snow and kissed and thought of dancing.

      We knew where we were and that we were

      what others would call an escape ecstatic

      with grief because we were so few,

      because our shadows wore so many

      unforgettable strangers.

      So there would be warmth and food, and still days

      by the river. There would be each other again

      and again in the light of a naked

      and forgiving room. There would be nameless

      secrets that would need nothing but to ask

      “Does anyone really survive?”

      and keep on asking.

      CONNECTIVITY

      A huge ball of twine turns to bread

      and feeds the five thousand, Jesus unrolling it

      and watching the sky for signs.

      In the church on the hill someone has lost

      the thread

      of her devotion while underground

      the minotaur sings sadly of a boy

      strung out, lost in the maze

      of shopping carts and limited offers

      and girls undressed, the gold filigree

      of youth lying

      all about them, worshippers

      filing past whatever follows something thin

      and pale, amazed, loaves and fishes

      and twine if you have it.

      Let those who hunger stretch forth

      their hands, all right?

      Let something come to show

      whose world [is this?]

      and which thread is more miraculous

      than dust.

      Bright red. Blue. Something heavy

      near your heart as Christ stands

      on the hillside of empty baskets, fish-bone trash

      and crusts of rye, immense cat’s cradle

      above him in the sky.

      DIMINISHING RETURNS

      A crow sits in the dark, thinking

      I’m an owl scouring this field for mice.

      Then he thinks, I’m suddenly wise, too:

      rem

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