670 and 671
Drop it where you never want to see it,
leave it where you never want to go now.
Hide, where no cartographer can map it,
anything you wish you didn’t know now.
Then, there stowed away, they are forgiven.
Live now, looking—going as you want to.
Left in places with no good things in them,
other vessels you’ll put good things into.
When, eventually, you are departed,
archaeologists will find the treasure.
What you knew, and desperately regretted,
others need to know in counter measure.
But don’t dwell upon it while you’re living.
Let such finds be what makes death forgiving.
~~~
Permit me to believe that—when the dregs
are swallowed, when the fallow years I’ve reaped,
when marrow in me, malnourishing, begs
for blood to be returned from whence it seeped,
when finally the heart discovers that
no gain nor dividend it has achieved
from all its coursing, when it sees how flat
its meter is, despite how well received
it’s been by others’ veins—let me believe
that there’s another who’s drunk dregs for me,
who’s fallowed and whose bones also would grieve
for a return they never got to see.
Let me believe that there’s another heart
that thirsts to drink what dregs mine can impart.