Poetry
Hazo, Samuel
Samuel Hazo Update Trying to toughen where the hurt came once and where it stays, you learn too late that nothing heals, that years are poultices, not cauteries. It takes so little for the...
...II" you believe the 'truest life" is when you are in '"dreams awake," your life is true beyond belief...
...you'll pay...
...By dark you sweat the sweat of stones...
...Your past is not your shadow but yourself, and now will stay right now until you die...
...They leave you asking what became of God...
...The death that Shakespeare said you owe to God...
...Why can't you stop and say instead the steady present tense of .suffering is just too much for you...
...But who cares what you say'.' Like any general preparing for a war that's past, you train yourself for battles you've already lost and call it wisdom...
...Bcrnhardt in her nightly coffin learned no more of readiness...
...The deaths you eat to live are bearable: the fresh deaths of greens...
...Midnights are voids where sleep no longer executes you into dawn but lets you linger and survive...
...But other deaths come first...
...You say you should have faced your fate like Bcrnhardt in her pall and let it purge you to the bones...
...It takes so little for the scars to peel and show the rawness, like a heart exposed by surgery, alive and breathing underneath...
...as she did, only once...
...the frozen deaths of hens, the deathtaste in the serious cracker that is Christ, the small deaths you call goodbyes, the sweet deaths that lovers die each lime they mate...
...The deaths that silence you are those you thought could never happen, but they did...
...from such rehearsals than the saints...
...By light you doodle circles on a pad to show yourself that something still can be complete...
Vol. 115 • May 1988 • No. 10
