The voice of the universe is terrifying. And still—damn it all—
I hear it, that incalculable birdcall so shrill it may well kill me, 
and I sing back. I’ve heard the old story of Tobias, of the
gleaming stranger at the front door, shrunk down, dressed
for traveling, no more frightening than a neighbor come to call
(just two young men eyeing each other, wonderingly).
But imagine that, really—the universe siphoning into a body’s 
disguise, stepping out from behind the stars, feet of the 
universe planted in the dirt: and tell me
our hearts wouldn’t batter us dead on the spot.  

What are you?

Hear the first high opening notes, the long indulgent runs, 
and look: mountain ranges, red as the morning, spine 
of creation, — each note, pollen of the radiant origin, 
hinges of light, passages, stairways, thrones, 
rooms built of being, bright shields forged from pleasure, fierce 
rapturous riot of sensation that abruptly shatters into oblivion,
and every shard a mirror: emanating that torrential beauty, then 
absorbing it back into its own infinitely faceted face. 

As for us? It’s there at the moment of feeling that it begins
to dissolve from us. Out and away like an exhale. Ember 
cooling to ash, the swirl of smoke dissipates. Someone might 
say to us: Yes, you are in my very veins, coursing through the rooms 
of me, the springtime is swollen with you, everywhere I look… 
But what’s the point? We can’t be kept. Already we’re receding, out 
from them, away from them. Even the loveliest face you’ve ever seen 
won’t be spared. It gets up and walks out on us, relentlessly, 
that brief beauty. We call it ours, but it drifts away—as dew 
evaporates in the morning sun, or steam lifts and curls
from the pot on the stove. Your smile, where’s it off to?
And that upturned gaze—oh, fresh hell—another surge, out
from the core of me, feeling and more feeling, escaping me.
Damn this. It’s the escape itself, see? That’s what we are.
When we dissolve like this, does it taste like us? Does
the universe really only capture its own outpouring, its own
bright loop, or might we, by accident, have a little of ourselves
swept up and swallowed, backwash caught in the universe’s cheek?
Are we there, even just barely, mingled with the universe like
the airy flush on the face of a pregnant woman? It doesn’t
recognize us, in the great whirling eddy of itself. (How could it?)

Think of the lovers, and what odd pillow talk, if they 
understood. Because it feels like everything keeps itself 
from us. Look—the trees are rooted; the houses
we live in, firm in their foundations. While we just drift past, 
rolling by all of it, like strangers brushing shoulders on the street. 
And everything has agreed on this, to keep us at arm’s length, 
half out of shame perhaps, half out of inexpressible hope.

Lovers: you, who have found everything you need in
the other—let me ask you this. You hold on so 
firmly. But where is your proof? Look, it’s happened
to me, that my hands turn inward, and in that work, this
tired body finds some rest. Briefly, there’s sensation.
But who can live like that? You though, you just let it
swell, and deepen, sensation on rapturous sensation,
as far as you can both take it, until the other, at last over-
come, calls the safeword —; you who grow larger under
your lover’s hands, all these copious uncountable riches, you
who at other times are wholly consumed, as they take and take
you. What do you think is going to happen? 
I know, you touch each other so fervently because that caress
keeps you here. The place you’ve planted your tenderness
stays warm. In the earth of their body, it feels immutable.
So you promise something like forever, in each other’s arms.
But when you’ve made it through all that you have: the terror
at first sight, and the yearning at the window, and that
long-ago walk, hand in hand through the garden:
are you really the same? As soon as one of you brought your 
mouth to the other, and began it —: drinking and drinking:
already, bizarrely, each of the drinkers started to slip away.

Weren’t you amazed by those Grecian sculptures, how 
reserved their human gestures seemed in the stone? That love
and leaving could lay so lightly on their shoulders—they must
have been made of a different stuff than us. Think of the hands, 
clasped so loosely, despite the strength they could surely summon. 
So carefully contained, they seem to say: we have this much, this 
is what’s ours, to touch like this, only. Our gods will pin us, 
press down on us harder and harder. But that is the gods’ business.

Could we do it too? Could we muster that clean, narrow, 
behaved humanity, our own thin strip of fertile ground
between the flowing river and the cliff? Our hearts would get to be 
too much for us, like that. We can’t go looking for our own likeness 
and expect to be soothed. Not least in those perfect bodies who, 
locked in stone, attain a stillness and a self-restraint we never will.