She cuts his hair

Otherwise, we're the same, only

shorter and colored. (White-

water towards delta, to the

ocean whose name we know

best in the earliest

light and latest evening, in the

quiet and cold, the first

snowflake expression of what

used to be blooming, drift and

dash of days numbered in ad-

vance, autumn trees like

coral in the saltwater

air worn innumerably

smooth). In a room, a woman

cuts a man's shower-wet

hair for the first time in

years: they have gently recon-

nected, never doubting that she'll

help or that he needs it -- he

needs it --, but repay it? He is

only a body, that

barely (is the bare neck

nakedness or nudity?). When she

kisses his crown, he is

taken by surprise -- just

taken --, hardly minds, he is

hardly a mind, he is

built to come running. (As we

do, to the ocean whose

name we express in no

breath, in the stark and cold

fiery glow, the crystal

chalice of light and gravi-

ty, where pendulum

swing pulls divinely on

root and trembles branches -- ever

innocent tree, drink of

scissor-crisp waters or her

thin milk, inner-thigh and

pale vein blue --, whistles

rock down through atmo-

sphere.) We are here, with some

distance to go to the

ocean; we flow con-

centric spheres around the

ripple of wells: gravi-

ty, morality. Tell the

truth: that surely there can

be no hell, for it

isn't and we are, simply,

earth at the roots; it's

not innocence, but the

water we can't (she

cuts his hair) stand to lose.

(Edited 9 August 2009, begun 7 August 2009: a relatively brief interval, with the lines out of a real space between, as I break from thinking philosophically -- for a book -- about silence in Roman poetry and its roles in and around utterance. Some of the imagery is older, helping me to wonder what poetry, etymologically 'doing', _does_ in letting things be said not only audibly but _renewably_ audibly, with even past things ever _now_.)