Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved

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Resurrection of the body of the beloved,
Which is the world
Which is the poem
Of the world, the poem of the body.

Mortal ourselves and filled with awe,
we gather the scattered limbs
Of Osiris.
That he should live again.
That death not be oblivion.

When I open the book
I hear the poets whisper and weep,
Laugh and lament.

In a thousand languages
They say the same thing:
“We lived. The secret of life
is love, that casts its wing
over all suffering, that takes
in its arms the hurt child,
that rises green from the fallen seed.”

Sadness is there, too.
All the sadness in the world.
Because the tide ebbs,
Because wild waves
Punish the shore
And the small lives lived there.
Because the body is scattered.
Because death is real
And sometimes death is not
Even the worst of it.

If sadness did not run
Like a river through the Book,
Why would we go there?
What would we drink?

Oh, there’s blood enough, and sap
From the stalks. Tears, too.
A raindrop and the dark water
Of bogs. It’s a rich ink.
Indelible, invisible
(hold up the page to the light,
hold the page near a flame).

The world comes into the poem.
The poem comes into the world.
Reciprocity – it all comes down
To that.
As with lovers:
When it’s right you can’t say
Who is kissing whom.

Lighten up, lighten up.
Let go of the heaviness.
Was it a poem from the Book
That so weighed you down?

Impossible. Less than a feather.
Less than the seed a milkweed
Pod releases in the breeze.

Lifted, it drifts out to settle
In a field, with all that’s inside it
Waiting to become
Root and tendril, to come alive.

Now the snow is falling
Even more than an hour ago.
The pine in the backyard
Bows with the weight of it.

Two years ago, my father
Died. What love we had
Hidden under misery,
Weighed down with years
Of silence.

And now,
Maybe the poem can free
Us, maybe the poem can express
The love and let the rest
Slide to the earth as the snow
Does now, freeing the tree
Of its burden.

To be alive: not just the carcass
But the spark.
That’s crudely put, but . . .

If we’re not supposed to dance,
Why all this music?

Time to shut up.
Voltaire said the secret
Of being boring
Is to say everything.

And yet I held
Back about love
All those years:
Talking about death
Insistently, even
As I was alive;
Talking about loss
As if all was loss,
As if the world
Did not return
Each morning.
As if the beloved
Didn’t long for us.

No wonder I go on
So. I go on so
Because of the wonder.


–Gregory Orr

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