Friday's daily poem (6/19/09)

Grief Management


The metabolism of the planet itself takes place in the blood.
Osip Mandelstam, A Conversation With Dante


All morning, up on Jacob’s ladder, he mows the wet grass,
because he has no more time left,
because the realtor said, by Tuesday.
Mostly he’s doing it because his girlfriend wants this drama over.
I can’t decide if he loves her or loves her horses,
although to me neither love makes sense.
It all seems as random as the fact that we used to have nine planets,
and nine orders of angels, and nine sisters in my family.

His parents are both dying in different rooms, so he has to sell the house
in which he never did find shelter
because the same relentless dark they felt, he felt,
because a kid doesn’t get to choose his dark at three.
But as Beatrice told Dante in The Paradiso,
each heavenly body has its own degree
of luminosity directed by the angels. And the grass on Jacob’s Ladder faces
the mower’s blade as if the sun were out.