A SONATA FOR FOUR HANDS

Causes and consequences line up,
Ready for the next dawn
With its blight

Of glass bulbs.
In the welled nothingness of definitely,
There is another

Sad sobbing day. Someone has seen you
And says you were fine
Just hours before you weren’t.

I say Come Back and you do
Not do what I want.
The train unrolls its track and sends its sound forward.

The siren unrolls its sound and sends itself
Forward. The first day of the last goes forward
As the last summer you’ll see.

The dirge is all wrong for the season. Death remains
Wedded to mystery. How
Does the heart stop? On what

Moment’s turning?
Which tick? And why? Only where
Is settled. Behind an address. Some block

Building. Some barricade brick
That hides bracketed hours
Until the doom door opens

And my I sees.
Police seal peeled back. Everything
As you left it. On and over and under.

Why are you not where you belong?
A black hat on a hook says nothing.
Ashes mirror ashes

In a mirroring window. And now how
Do we resolve this predicament?
The body becomes the art

Of identity. A face
In a photograph. The bas relief
Around the morgue door.

You, singularly you. And gone
Invisibe.

THERE IS NO PRETENDING

There is no pretending to know
What crawls out of the mind lying quiet
By itself in the snow of the grave grass.
The living know this alone:
The onomatopoetic fout-ta-ta-rou of the mitral valve
Inferred but not felt by a mind that has left
Itself to others. Decisionless and dull, I am one
With the glass-bound aluminum clouds
In a glitter-knitted metallica sky. I live on
The bite of air that follows a door’s night close
And the dusky base of the thumbnail that darkens
As it presses down on earth fading away beneath
It. Pax, peace. Axe, beat
Of the heart and its dumb numbered afterecho.

HOW BEAUTIFUL

A personal lens: glass bending rays
That gave one that day’s news
Saying each and every day,

Just remember you are standing
On a planet that’s evolving.
How beautiful, she thought, what distance does

For water, the view from above or afar.
In last night’s dream, they were back again
At the beginning. She was a child

And he was a child.
A plane lit down and left her there.
Cold whitening the white sky whiter.

Then a scalpel cut her open for all the world
To be a sea.

From Elegy. Copyright 2007 by Mary Jo Bang. All rights reserved.