I believe, rather, in the music of grace that we hear, sometimes

    1
There are things I tell to no one.
Those close to me might think
I was depressed, and try to comfort me.
At such times I go off alone, in silence, as if listening for God.

    2
I say "God"; I believe,
rather, in the music of grace
that we hear, sometimes, playing to us
from the other side of happiness.
When we hear it, when it flows
through our bodies, it lets us live
these days lighted by their vanity
worshiping—as the other animals do,
who live and die in the spirit
of the end—that backward-spreading
brightness. And it speaks in notes struck
or caressed or blown or plucked
off our own bodies: remember
existence already remembers
the flush upon it you will have been,
you who have reached out ahead
and taken up some of the black dust
we become, souvenir
which glitters already in the bones of your hand.

    3
Just as the supreme cry
of joy, the cry of orgasm, also has a ghastliness to it,
as though it touched forward
into the chaos where we break apart, so the death-groan
sounding into us from another direction carries us back
to our first world, so that the one
whose mouth acids up with it remembers
how oddly fearless he felt
at first imagining the dead,
at first seeing the grandmother or grandfather sitting only yesterday
on the once cluttered, now sadly tidy porch,
that little boned body drowsing almost unobserved into the agreement to die.

    4
Brothers and sisters;
lovers and children;
great mothers and grand fathers
whose love-times have been cut
already into stone; great
grand foetuses spelling
the past again into the flesh's waters:
can you bless—or not curse—
whatever struggles to stay alive
on this planet of struggles?
The nagleria eating the convolutions
from the black pulp of thought,
or the spirochete rotting down
the last temples of Eros, the last god?

Then the last cry in the throat
or only dreamed into it
by its threads too wasted to cry
will be but an ardent note
of gratefulness so intense
it disappears into that music
which carries our time on earth away
on the great catafalque
of spine narrowed with god's-flesh,
thighs bruised by the blue flower,
pelvis that makes angels shiver to know down here we mortals make love with our bones.

    5
In this spirit
and from this spirit, I have learned to speak
of these things, which once I brooded on in silence,
these wishes to live
and to die
in gratefulness, if in no other virtue.

For when the music sounds,
sometimes, late at night, its faint
clear breath blowing
through the thinning walls of the darkness,
I do not feel sad, I do not miss the future or need to be comforted.

Yes, I want to live forever.
I am like everyone. But when I hear
that breath coming through the walls,
grace-notes blown
out of the wormed-out bones,
music that their memory of blood
plucks from the straitened arteries,
that the hard cock and soaked cunt
caressed from each other

in the holy days of their vanity,
that the two hearts drummed
out of their ribs together,
the hearts that know everything (and even
the little knowledge they can leave
stays, to be the light of this house),

then it is not so difficult
to go out, to turn and face
the spaces which gather into one sound, I know now, the singing
of mortal lives, waves of spent existence
which flow toward, and toward, and on which we flow
and grow drowsy and become fearless again.

[Galway Kinnell {1927-2014}, 'There are Things I Tell to No One' from Selected Poems]