poem of the day
Late Beauty
(Saint Augustine, Confessions, Book X)
A shimmer of doves over the canyon of 116th Street:
they are like the fraying of the dark edge of concentration
against the brilliance of this earthly light,
not the birds themselves, but only their images
above a winter landscape supine, withdrawn,
still undeceived by the vernal miracle.
I have learnt to love you late,
Beauty at once so ancient and so new!
I have learnt to love you late!
They divide into two bodies above the broken tenement,
like wings of barley flung votive into the flame
of a hunger not yet conscious of itself.
Augustine asks, Must we know God before we can pray?
I know they are raised on the tenement rooftops for food.
They return to their throne in the north by the light of day.
I have learnt to love you late,
Beauty at once so ancient and so new!
I have learnt to love you late!
They wheel in silence, a shakedown, an evanescence.
They plead with the light itself like an undulant prayer:
Not what I once was, but what I am now.
In their stalled phalanx they veer, as at the blow of a hand.
a body manifold on the unresisting air,
the bodies of my parents in this light that fails.
I have learnt to love you late,
Beauty at once so ancient and so new!
I have learnt to love you late!
Every morning I wake to the voices of doves
in the courtyard and my neighbor's Gregorian chant:
the vulgar murmur and the music of praise.
A bull-necked male performs a little hopping dance,
his rainbow wattles throbbing. In a gray glare of wings,
the round-eyed, soiled incarnation is complete.
I have learnt to love you late,
Beauty at once so ancient and so new!
I have learnt to love you late!
"What would you have words do?" a poet asked me,
"and is it the same thing as what you would have your life do?"
The sounds of their names in my memory:
these things have passed through the air and are no more.
Light, the queen of colors, in a hollow sanctuary.
Yet