Blessed

by Carolyn Steinhoff

. . . who’s had to love the madness

of his loneliness is blessed. 

--Franz Wright

Image credit: Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

I’m sewing the letter-sounds together, letting the meanings fall

like feathers under our feet, the people floating free as seeds, as the brave gracious dead who love me, as perfect words out there somewhere,

enforced solitude a prayer unbroken

while clouds thicken over us like a blanket of jealousy, zero-sum love;

who knows that love, those answers, all those words accumulated up there like balloons

that will release themselves at the victory party that will become my life?

That sorrow knows, that I hold like a dying child, leaves that fall and return

know

what I do

what I do not

that this time god is

not ecstasy but stillness.

That rocks wrested from deepest places,

mined, carved, forged

into the greatest city on earth

are grander than any silence I’ve known

that comes from me, for me, like a masked agent;

would that the rocks from which one forged

one’s promises would grow light

as fly wings and never have to be kept,

silence become light as the secret madness that unties itself

like the hero in the TV show,

would that it would miraculously escape,

would lift.

***

Carolyn Steinhoff

Carolyn Steinhoff’s poems have been published in Book of Matches, Conjunctions, Global Poemic, The Indypendent, and others. Her books, History of the Future and Under the World, were published by Nauset Press. In his blurb for Under the World, the late John Ashbery wrote, in part, “These are haunting, plangent poems that reverberate in one’s consciousness long after reading."