May I

  Young Mother in the Grotto Auguste Rodin 1885-1891 When I Look Back You Are   Gone     It’s hard to describe extreme pain, and the pain of cancer has an otherworldly intimacy that makes it almost impervious to words. It feels like existence itself is eating you.                         Christian Wiman                         Zero at the Bone                                     Fifty Entries Against                                     Despair   To save you they took my labor up into a tiny vial like a spinal   and delivered you down the chamber alone as the blind Orpheus whose fingers   gripped the hard harp bone & whose breath was held, obviously stoppered   for the one song the only charm it was the old lament and the gods   were wrong in believing they couldn’t be so moved by human suffering they’d let go   their own grip.  But they did.  It was the oxy song of the day.  A lotus.   And they

  What does a mirror see When it sees into another Mirror?

  Aubade for You on this Day This  September First Day   It is better to say “I am suffering,” Writes Simone Weil, “than to say ‘This landscape is ugly.’”                                     Christian Wiman                                     Zero at the Bone:                                                 Fifty Entries                                                 Against Despair     Sometimes without you the sky is wide it is wide it is so wide it casts no shadow no shadow can be cast it cannot be cast it is without cloud it is cloudless it is shifting it is wind without wind without enough wind to make it white or grey or black it is dustless nothing has risen nothing has and without what cannot spur the dust to rise there is no dust and dustless it is without color the sky is without color it is without a drop of water a drop of water that cannot freeze that cannot become ice that cannot become snow or rain that cannot fall or be thrust out some