There's an art

to everything. How

the rain means

April and an ongoingness like

that of song until at last

 

it ends. A centuries-old

set of silver handbells that

once an altar boy swung,

processing...You're the same

wilderness you've always

 

been, slashing through briars,

the bracken

of your invasive

self. So he said,

in a dream. But

 

the rest of it-all the rest-

was waking: more often

than not, to the next

extravagance. Two blackamoor

statues, each mirroring

 

the other, each hoisting

forever upward his burden of

hand-painted, carved-by-hand

peacock feathers. Don't

you know it, don't you know

 

I love you, he said. He was

shaking. He said:

I love you. There's an art

to everything. What I've

done with this life,

 

what I'd meant not to do,

or would have meant, maybe, had I

understood, though I have

no regrets. Not the broken but

still-flowering dogwood. Not

 

the honey locust, either. Not even

the ghost walnut with its

non-branches whose

every shadow is memory,

memory...As he said to me

 

once, That's all garbage

down the river, now. Turning,

but as the utterly lost-

because addicted-do:

resigned all over again. It

 

only looked, it-

It must only look

like leaving. There's an art

to everything. Even

turning away. How

 

eventually even hunger

can become a space

to live in. How they made

out of shamelessness something

beautiful, for as long as they could.