body is a young hawk sitting on a tree by the Mississippi, in early
spring, before any green has appeared on the earth beneath. Some
days walnut hollows in my chest fill with crackling light and shad-
ows. There birds drink from water drops. ... My body loves you
with what it extracts from the prudent man, hunched over his col-
only of lizards; and with that it loves you madly, beyond all rules and
conventions. Even the six holes in the flute move about under the
dark man's fingers, and the piercing cry goes out over the grown-up
pastures no one sees or visits at dusk except the deer, out of all
enclosures, who has never seen any bed but his own of wild grass.
I first met you when I had been alone for nine days, and now my
lonely hawk body longs to be with you, whom it remembers ... it
knew how close we are, we would always be. There is death but also
this closeness, this joy when the bee rises into the air above his hive
to find the sun, to become the son, and the traveler moves through
exile and loss, through murkiness and failure, to touch the earth
again of his own kingdom and kiss the ground. ...
What shall I say of this? I say, praise to the first man who wrote
down this joy clearly, for we cannot remain in love with what we
cannot name. ...
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