Wednesday, January 05, 2011

Human Beauty

If you write a poem about love ...


the love is a bird,



the poem is an origami bird.

If you write a poem about death ...



the death is a terrible fire,

the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames



you feed to the fire.

We can see, in these, the space between



our gestures and the power they address

—an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,



a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm

from out of nowhere hit New York one night



in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught

unloading props: a box



of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped

and broken open, and that flash of white



confetti was lost

inside what it was a praise of

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