Elizabeth Bisegna Gaston

Some light still comes down as sunlight, and dawn,
dawn is dawn is dawn. A blue waterway was blue
and the wind across it which knew nothing, knew nothing.
Begin now, bright salvation of the intellect, for we are base and lowly,
and incapable of saving ourselves —
a scene such as this cannot save us, sorry, we are sorry.
To all of you, whose God is good, ask something on our behalf.
Planetary madness left incomplete
that astrology be embraced
beyond its metaphorical principals
that something like a cubit or a helix
be left alone like a loaf of bread
that somehow we drift and drift and it is blue
like the crazy one who knows she's crazy.
Sit and embrace the adaptation you were born for.

Everything was explained in the letter.
Ice on the water. Water and madmen floating
in tug boats. The night needing lights.
The small cabin. The men lifting and
the piano playing on through it all.
Anxiety cascading and stillness showing
itself in the falls. Two years and hundreds
and hundreds of days shuffling themselves
back and forth, like your best friend
stabbing you in the back in a movie and
someone coming to the door again and
you taking it to heart, moving through
the square, moving through the city, moving
through the years, taking years to fill
the years. October and other months.
November and other months. No novels will
not take you through the streets with them.
Letters will not take you through the streets
with them. The French man in the movie had
them build the house for him. We watched him
eat his lunch and die. We were marble when
she came to the door, we were not ourselves.
Oysters in the hands of Frenchman, movies in
the rooms of Americans. Boat dredging the bay
while the city does nothing from a distance.
Her empty room and the tape played
half-way through. Some horrible damage kept
beating the lilies into a powder which
we smoked. Those, in their actions, who
are unkind, and those, in their actions
who are kind, live to drive, to go by the water
again and again. When you leave the city
go north. When you come to the falls,
sit by the falls. When you sit by the falls
write an essay on nature. When you finish
the essay, sit by the falls. When the French man
comes, let him sit beside you. When he talks
of the house, picture the study. When he slips
into dream, picture the study. When he kills you
sadly, die there sadly. The empty study will
see the year end. When you want to leave,
go north from the city.

Kneeling by the prayer wheel
I saw it again
                    3 follows 2
                    2 follows 1
            and how best not to hurt anyone's feelings

The spinning of plates on poles
or the levitation of anything over a hand

or a song for which
we must help others
with their needs

                    or to have escaped a week ago
by raft—the beard, the equation of rations. The sun
and everyone back home carries on, for this is
how it is promised to be and so, how it is

                    and from there the kicked in center
of the sea squealed at our arrival

the centuries
and then the shoulder
and then the backseat driver
and then affixed to the screen

             and to each other, and then again
with the blue world before us, unfearful, as
around everyone the axe dance continues

for we get dressed and we pray and
some thus far too lovely
and this way (and this way
are done again) the pale, passed
on — thy directive and ways

Hold me so, and let me
explain what I have learned

The craft rocked in the weakening waves,
our catch drying upon it, and us in one
open cove after another

and what I saw from down there was a growing bright in others,
one at a time

             to know and to come to know