And how I keep it in, keep it in when all it wants to do is fly up and away until it is lover well met and lover well spent, tongue hanging out, briny palms, sweaty forehead in the joy that wants to romp and play and laugh a little, laugh a lot, weep arm in arm with St. Francis walking down the winding cobblestone streets circa now circa always with frayed ropes for belts, and how hard it is to keep it in day after day, year after year through the calendar of days and the counting of days that exist only as figures while inside I feel it turning and churning like foam in the bubble line of the river and how to enjoy the world and every fruit and nut of it and one day offer my own skin and bones to the river or cairn of stones and would you dopple me, would you motorolla and turn me inside out and upside down so that the brook trout colors can shine like dawn light and raiment of sky streaked with clouds and for this we were made, you and I, to rise as smoke to be one with the firmament and one with the lilacs who take their cues from the constellations and we will sing and we will dance and not have to keep it in anymore, oh, the moon will bathe our nakedness in pools of its own and we will love so much we will come back only as rain to water the fields and valleys and the little old Mennonite woman’s garden that is already blessed because she poured her whole life into it and the deaths of her children, her favorite cat Ivan as her one blind eye stares without seeing though somehow recognizing the roundness of our drops as we fall.

Note: The line “the blissful responsibility to enjoy the world” is taken from Clarence Brown’s introduction to Nadazhda Mandelstam’s book Hope Against Hope.  

Robert Vivian‘s next book will be a collection of dervish essays (prose poems) called Mystery My Country, which will be published next year along with another book co-written with the poet Richard Jackson called Traversings.