concerning the book that is the body of the beloved

7/29/2019 Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved

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Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved

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 limbsOf 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 shoreAnd 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


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Like a river through the Book,

Why would we go there?

What would we drink?

Oh, theres blood enough, and sap

From the stalks. Tears, too.A raindrop and the dark water

Of bogs. Its 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 its right you cant 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 thats 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 fatherDied. What love we had

Hidden under misery,

Weighed down with years

Of silence.

And now,

Maybe the poem can free


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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.

Thats crudely put, but . . .

If were 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

Didnt long for us.

No wonder I go on

So. I go on so

Because of the wonder.

~ Gregory Orr ~

(Meridian

, Issue 14, Fall/Winter 2004)

concerning the book that is the body of the beloved

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