GALWAY KINNELL

I've recently been enjoying a Galway-Kinnell trifecta: Body Rags; Mortal Acts, Mortal Words; and The Past. He is, of course, one of the masters. But poets and their poems don't stick with me simply because someone long ago said, "He's a real genius," or, "That's one for the Norton Anthology." 

This particular Kinnell poem has been my mind-companion for many weeks. Reading it every time is like this blurry memory: after so many days of traveling -- sleeping in crowded train cars, making new friends in hostels, reading and walking through history, getting lost down cobblestone streets -- finally, cold-nosed and limp, I heave open a heavy wooden door. It is warm inside. I walk toward the altar and sit. I am quiet for the first time in days - longer even. I slouch, base of my skull on the wooden pew, and look up. For a long time, I watch the murals of time and the story of being perpetually told on the cathedral ceiling, and I feel known. A tiny being with vaster inward space. 

[Pause] 

I observe the hours and yearn.

Wait

Wait, for now.

Distrust everything if you have to.

But trust the hours. Haven't they
carried you everywhere, up to now?

Personal Events will become interesting again.

Hair will become interesting.

Pain will become interesting.

Buds that open out of season will become interesting. 

Second-hand gloves will become lovely again;

their memories are what give them

the need for other hands. The desolation

of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness 

caved out of such tiny beings as we are 

asks to be filled; the need

for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.

Don't go too early.

You're tired. But everyone's tired.

But no one is tired enough.

Only wait a little and listen:

music of hair,

music of pain,

music of looms weaving our loves again.

Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,

most of all to hear your whole existence,

rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.