Hope

All art aspires to the condition of music,
said someone who knew how to dream.
When I get weary and turn to the music,

the wilderness clears, love’s fog returns.
The Pacific was never anyone’s. Waves
roll slowly in with their cargo and back
they go to join the rhythms of the moon.

From where dead fathers emerge to live
in the dance of their daughters, Nowhere
is sometimes within what I call beautiful,
I do not have to bear a woman's weight.

That was all Bobby could write he could
believe, and that only because he did not
believe in beauty, he was too young to be
so frail. He was too blind to see otherwise.

The music is Nowhere, and only beauty
of feeling is music. Her father lives only
in her grief. She lives, and her beauty is
the fact of breath, love inside coming out.

This is how a world was, then new life.
What is a soul if not the tremor of pulse
left over, hairline fracture of the heart
broken where grief likes to go to thrive.

Virgil, What will I learn I do not know?
When do we leave the devil’s asshole?
Why does rising come only after falling . . .

(21 March 2012)

copyright 2012 by Floyce Alexander