sunday, april 5
it's still the early years of a century
the kind of time our survivors and theirs
might understand hazily
as an age undone in the succession of catastrophe
— but that's every age, every ongoing moment
the records scarcely contain and
art seldom transmits more than
a fraction of the truth of any
arrangement of persons and facts
considered as a totality, as what it
necessarily was
the real shape of 1922, 1967, 1981
gutters and dissipates, consumes itself
in consequence,
until it's no more possible to apprehend
than the hour of the crucifixion
it's palm sunday, april 5, 2009
in colorado and outside
my window an uncertain snow is
just on the edge of visible
in memory, the tiny church in kansas
children with palm branches
the idea of triumph proceeding backwards
from the coming tragedy, the necessary loss
waiting its ceremony
biding, in the familiar telling, its agony.