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 Vo
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