And now that we have told ourselves it’s over,
we can walk back through the darkness of the garden
and look up through the briar to the wild skies.
This is the country of childhood, the new moon
like a filly in the willows, carrying our silence like a bridle.
We have taken
the only road we had to; we have laid our hands
on the carnage of our own hearts
like scriptures that the lost alone have written;
we have told ourselves
only mystery can live.
Listen, we told ourselves,
in the first days: if tonight
there is no one left to hold us, there is still
this dark and wild hymning; there is still
this new song
in this one world; there is still
the music of what is.
No more, no more waiting.
Cold
is the old, high way of changes,
and when no one, when not a soul
will hold you, tell yourself, when the wind comes
to hold you, tell yourself
that the end, too, has its splendor,
that the breath of it, the breath of it
is endless,
and whatever you have done with it, your one life,
there are the moments when the broken world is silent
and the moments when the song
is all we have left,
and the moment when we hold ourselves
in our own arms
and the song we sing to the one we hold
in that coldness
sings very close to the song that would have been.
Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 23, Issue 3.
Joseph Fasano is the author of the novel The Dark Heart of Every Wild Thing (Platypus Press, 2020), which was named one of the “20 Best Small Press Books of 2020” by Maudlin House. His books of poetry are Fugue for Other Hands (2013), Inheritance (2014), Vincent (2015) and The Crossing (2018), all from Cider Press Review. His honors include the Rattle Poetry Prize and a nomination for the Poets’ Prize, “awarded annually for the best book of verse published by a living American poet two years prior to the award year.” His work has appeared in The Yale Review, The Southern Review, Boston Review, Missouri Review, The Times Literary Supplement, The American Poetry Journal, American Poets, Verse Daily, the PEN Poetry Series, Measure, and the Academy of American Poets’ poem-a-day series, among other publications. He is the Founder of the Poem for You Series, and he teaches at Manhattanville College and Columbia University. More information can be found at josephfasano.net.
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