The Song of Songs

This is how it is: we live again.
We rise up
from the sickbed in our thinness
and we walk again
and we open
every window,
and we say again, like children,
we are strong.

Yes, my friends, I have a thing to tell you:

My story
is like any, on this hard earth:

I rose up, I was broken,
and I rose again—

and although I closed my arms
around my body,
although I said I wouldn't
be the singing,
the nights have filled my life with brutal music
that has taught me that we're only here 
to listen,
to hold each other awhile
and to listen,

and to carry each other
with the song of songs inside us
that is wiser, and is greater than our changes,
and that sings the way most wholly when we're lost.

Elegy for a Teacher

It takes thousands of years
for a single gesture to ripen:
to lift a child,
to braid their hair,
to hold—

I know this. I know
because I've opened—
closed myself and closed myself
and opened;

I have lifted my friend's hand
a final time
like the deep-grooved glove of a falconer

that has mastered the infinite difference
between giving up and letting something go.

Love Poems to Our Friends

Why is this not the genre of all genres?

Not for star-crossed loves,
for agonies of desire,
but words for those who go with us
the whole road.

How would they start, I wonder?
You let me crash
when I was new to ruin.
You held my hair in the bathroom
at that wedding.
You held me when my loves 
were done, were flames.

Yes, we will lose a few
in the changes.
But these are the ones
who save us:
not the charmers,
not the comets of wild passion,
not the up-and-down of love's unlucky hunger,

but the ones who stand
by our shoulder at the funeral
and lead us back to the city of the living
and put our favorite record on the player
and go away, and come back,
always come back,

with bread and wine
and one word, one word: stay.

ICU

So you've woken
in your hospital gown
in the shadows.
So you're clutching
the get-wells
in your desperate hands,
your lungs like crushed doves
in your bedclothes.
Didn't they sing once? Didn't you
turn everything to song?
Say it: Already
you know the answer:
What if, just once, you truly listened:
to the spreading leaves, to the stranger's breath
in the next bed.
You hear it? You hear what the body
is saying?
Remember even breathing is a great song.
Remember even breathing is a great song.

Affirmation

Say you wake with a second chance.
Say you find yourself
in a green place, your grief-clothes
folded beside you.
Say you wade out
through moonlight
and lay your face against the face
of the great mare. Say it:
the world does not come to us
as mercy. It comes
as fierce wild beauty, as the lover
who leaves you in the parking lot, the friend
who turns without a reason,
the life that you betrayed for name and gold.
This is what it is, this burning world—
leather and cold steel and iron.
Even so, even now, it comes to you,
frisking its tail in the morning
light, smelling of open earth and rivers.
All your life it's been finding ways to tell you:
Your heart, too, your heart 
is wild horses.
Never
          let      a life       that doesn't
   know itself
ever lay a hand upon those foals.

Magdalene

I tell you mercy is real.
He came to me
and lay beside me, as love does,
folding my own arms around my body.
He taught me how to raise the dead
within me,
how to get them out
into the morning air.
He whispered my one work is to wake you.

Listen. One story
is over. But another
is only beginning.

And you who wake
in winter,
you who say
your life is cold and over,
who say there is nothing
left to wonder,
how do you know
what spring is,
how do you know,
in this coldness,
when you lie alone in the folding
of your own arms,
that you haven't already awoken
in the dark with the one who will save you?

Copyright © Joseph Fasano, 2024.
All rights reserved.