A Poem from "Song of the Overcast": "For the Attenuated"

For the Attenuated

Praise, my dear one.

Let us disappear into praising.

Nothing belongs to us.

—Rilke, from “Elegy for Marina”

 

 

I seem attenuated, my friend the physicist

tells me. I think I know what he means. I am

 

stretched thin by grief, the taut wire of my life

grown weak. I wear it on my face, show it

 

in my crawl through the day, nights populated

with dreams of the missing. He says it

 

as though he fears me. But I am not a graven

image, a token of anguish to be looked on. 

 

We are all living in extremis, attached, tensile,

to this wire. Swifts caught in the air above

 

the tipu trees, starlings wound around a belfry

as on a guide rope. We are all in thrall

 

to the earth—a line of seagulls, lit by the sunset,

forming a ladder to the sea. We are held

 

together by what has sliced us open. The tide

comes to shore and rushes back out to meet

 

itself. Here is your grief, on my face. My

gaping heart knowing yours.

—From Song of the Overcast, a chapbook of poems by Beverly Voigt