(1) Yield
Our bodies bearing ever in this cold
are gatherers, assembling amen
from yes a hundred, no ten thousandfold,
slowly learning to be wide again,
take on wind the sleet-bringer’s burden,
raft the falling white that weathers hands
in vessels earthy and so little earthen
they break growing to hold. As each disbands
it leaves its freight to float upon the water,
a ring ever expanding in the ply
of hip and hail, river and bone matter,
resembling the reflection of an eye
above, that might in greater light have been
upon it, seeing what here it could not win.
(2) By the Campfire
Was it my weakness that I did discern
where smoke half witnessed in the body curled
and pointed? Daily did my body burn
to find room for that weakness in this world!
Is want weak? Should smoulder be forgot?
Is marrow carried into sunset years
less load by night, the wolf’s eye not
keenest then on the very fire he fears?
Bright the body burned, while the fang,
following in and after me, cried
white to the open wind, hungering sang.
This the flesh avails: to abide
the long slow seen here strive.
Weeds withered alive; I wait alive.
(3) Hoard
Where does old light go?
When waves to west at sunset, gladdening
to rise at last unhindered, break into
the road of sight there is a reddening
or goldening upon them as they fall.
Is it their own, an ember each must give
at going, or does sun’s red seedball
ending widen, scatter that they should live?
Mirroring over each other, seen not got,
fire and water marry but not long.
Where does their gold remain – or does it not?
Are gulls seeking after seeking wrong?
Light is the treasure, sight itself the thing.
See the wave. See the fading wing.
(4) He Leadeth Me
There is a knower, but he bears my name.
He is not other to the pores or eyes
that measured out or in all path I came,
not beyond the clovers as they rise
to bear me up along all meadow’s edge.
What urges in my shoes is not debris
but sharer, comer down and into knowledge
that is the walk I’m helping him to see.
Light is no foreign thing. Whatever sees
goes in the colors that my iris shows,
tents here in eyelid canopies,
faint with me but far in what it knows.
Heat in my heels spreads. He’ll not escape
that bramble blaze. His light will take my shape.
--Lloyd Haft (from Anthropos, Querido 1996)
