Letter to an Angel

​The river is spilling over.
 
We picked silverweed at night-time
Like running water, unthinking.
 
Can you see the outline now?
Moving invisible as marshes
That are not,
because they do not know.
 
But I glimpsed in abandoned eyes
The whole world in its shadow
And now the air grows silverweed:
 
Moss
is spreading on the silence.
 
We picked silverweed at night-time.
 
The colour slips
—A fly has gotten within the skin,
And words creep out the mortal hole.
 
Like running water, unthinking.
 
Does it feed you, this river?
With me, it feeds just moss
                                        at the lining.
 
Like night-time running.
 
And I wonder at the swelling silence.
The river is spilling over--
But we still are still here,
and not filled in.

Emil Cioran, hearing Bach for the first time
 
          "Bach's music is the only argument proving the creation of the Universe can not be
​          regarded a complete failure”
          –E.C.
 
 
There are no records
of him ever visiting a church for mass,
so it must have happened
 
in private: his Paris apartment,
or, earlier, the student winding the handle
of his first gramophone
 
and finding out, through the crackle,
What Heaven
would be like, if there were one.
 
But he felt his beliefs thin
under the needle then,
the twin harmonic lines
 
spelling it out: some evidence of higher
design was legible
in Bach. Until the end,
 
of God and the Leipziger Kantor
he could never tell for certain
which of the two had composed the other.

ON A STILL DAY FROM A DISTANCE
 
The fog – ungracious – is retreating back thinning
itself refusing to eat the air brush the sea.
It milks the moment mark you it flows serene
plotting tricky patches letting arcs of spinning
light rustle through its innards. The fog will longer
play its part long enough just long enough to jinx
the tale’s end. 
                            A little boat setting out rope links
its stern to the promontory’s bow no stronger
than thread than hair from here but snapping fine string
burns the fingers. Someone trails a hand through fog through
water. There is a flash – connection! – ripples grow
wider faster in sunlight breaking mist. Vengeful
a swirl of brownish dead seaweed smacks wet and dull.
 
dull and wet smacks seaweed dead brownish swirl a
vengeful mist breaking sunlight in faster wider
grow ripples connection flash there. water
through fog through hand a trail someone. fingers burn
string fine snapping but here from hair thread
stronger no bow promontory’s stern
links rope out setting boat little.
                                                                   end tale
jinx enough long just enough long part its play
longer fog. innards through rustle light
spinning arcs letting patches tricky plotting
serene flow you mark moment milks.
sea brushes air eats refusing itself
thinning back retreating ungracious fog.