Only half of the voice is known,

and you are the other sound,

and beyond that the locusts 

swarm their green complications.

It’s just sunlight at the end of the book,

swarming sunlight, the fluttering insects 

of all the senses pent up in the single story,

and you have to go now, you pack your bags,

but—bad luck—the lintels are not painted, 

and the dark one’s at the door. 

All day the shadows have analyzed the air:

the backside of the stone,

and the figure there,

and the backside of the figure,

where the corpse in blue serge 

has bleeding genitals for centuries 

from an arrow he deserved. A captain,

a colonel, no one knows his rank or name.

The river, the ridge, the bend in the river,

the earth of circumstance—

and name and body are never there,

where the words in slate below

a heraldic head with wings say, here

is the body. Wars and passions go on

pianissimo beyond the ebenezers, 

tides of the something, the thing, the falls,

this perpetual matter in which the movings—

of a sponge in her hand to his lips, to the blood,

and, elsewhere, the boy in stripes,

a titmouse, slow shiftings of snow 

on the hood of the grill, the softer, the harder

heart of the one in the chair—

are witnessed by one 

and one only, the missing body,

behind the quietest shoulders of the wind. 

One night… So a story ends and begins.

Mountain building, faults offset, fanning

streams and silts. Lakes. Glaciers.

Glaciers gone. The present world.

One night… So the story begins.

The friend who has passed through death

(death: sending everything, immediately

everything, the body of Christ-Moses-Me,

not the sins of man but the pain being

every being) has a story, the only story:

there is a next day.

And every next day intersects

with the very last day, when we go to our bodies at last,

let into Egypt, our happiest homecoming.

One night down in the level pasture 

eleven children went to watch the cows.

There was only one way down.

They took the other one and heard

her groaning. Then she calved

a dead. And walked a circle 

round where the body had been

but left no depression in the grass.

So the flesh springs back after appearances,

but the god’s escapades (the old-sun-

and-cow story) have bruised our eyes,

the dusts haven’t settled

in the tracks of his vibrant wheels.

And the lady. The law. The love. The slow

round way of the cow. She groaned. Then

she calved a living.

That night there are many who see

the river heaving

to clear its throat they said.

That seems to be the end of stories,

but then men climb out of the water,

and from where they stand 

leap into what they are,

flying the lactic shining way through years of nights

to taste her spurting insight

when he wrenches his mouth free.

Later our eyes set us down 

on the front steps in rush baskets. Blurry baskets,

anonymous, and no note, those who find us say,

who touch our faces… it feels like writing… 

Later they say there, in blood, on our foreheads,

was written one word: WITNESS.

Telestai. It is what is written.

It has been finished, they say he said.

He said it. The other one wrote it down.

And bowed his head. 

It is finished. It has been finished.