Giving away clothes

you wore so perfectly in

life. The silver bean

necklace, the boiled wool

blue jacket from Austria.

Your girlfriends love them.

They have new life now.

I have a hard time moving

on. I make a fool

of myself: a neck-

lace, a blue coat: it’s not you.

Oh, nothing like you.

“One does not die of love—that’s the horror.” Jean-Luc Marion The Erotic Phenomenon, 156.

Mute swans gather and

open and close their great wings

and cough in the dusk.

In autumnal cold

they cough with desire and splash

into dark water.

You, always with me.

Silence is no answer and

I sing a swan song

to the too muchness.

The swans have cleared the cove now.

You, always with me.

“Suspicion derives directly from the temporal finitude of eroticization—I can no more escape it than I can shirk my flesh.” Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, p. 152

Down by the water

after sundown, listen to

the ducks call. Refuse

to see the beloved

face. The ducks in the darkness

call. Accept the void.

We reached the glory

of our flesh last night. We part

confused and happy.

Listen to the ducks.

You have nothing to say, she

has nothing to say.

Work-in-progress

Listen to the grass

grow now as pale summer wanes,

the silence moving

you to kiss goodbye

one more time. So let love be

which knows no let. Snow

will keep the grass till you come

remembering this time.

You may change and still

return to this place to find

yourself in another.

“To love without knowing whom I love remains a loving and a knowing that I love.” Jean-Luc Marion, The Erotic Phenomenon, 111.

Here I am down here

alone in the rosy dusk

at the hurricane’s

far edge. Pale swans bob

in the high tide, some softly

croak. It’s a habit

of mine to visit

this place. I am a lover

without an other,

passive, expectant.

We will see what happens next.

The wind is rising.

“In coming to what seems most intimately one’s own, one comes upon what is not self- owned.” Desmond, Intimate Universal, 74..

Rain tapping my hood,

first sign of the hurricane.

I watch the swans float

in the salt grass and

taller grasses, brown and gold.

What am I that I

find peace as it grows

dark and the rain drops thicken?

The swans, water, wind

compose the world now

where I’m a witness to the

only self I own.

“Beauty is a between happening in one sense, but in another sense there is no between separating the universal and the particular in that the beautiful between is (metaxologically) the intimate universal.” IU 100

Work-in-progress

Dry thunder over

the Bay. Mountains of clouds drift

apart. Gaps appear.

The Bay wrinkles, bright

in the late afternoon sun.

The mirror she saw

and wondered about

reappears. Her question shines.

Beauty contains, says

the philosopher,

the co-presence of its source.

I can believe it.

Work-in-progress

“The between-being of the beautiful, in the richness of immanent incarnation, communicates the abiding mystery but in no way dispels it.” Desmond, Intimate Universal, 85.

Couples are common

in the park this time of year.

I hear them whisper

between incoming

waves, voices rising, falling.

Strange intimacy!

And I am other

to myself, defined by death.

As the night deepens,

the place grows empty.

One last look at the horizon‘s

cold open spaces.

Pray for me. I pray

for you, whose beauty reminds

my still avid mind.

Form in its splendor is to the fore in beauty, shining with the sign of universality, but attending to the strange intimacy. William Desmond, The Intimate Universal, 100.

A beautiful dusk,

a muggy late summer dusk,

sometimes a rare breeze

off the Bay. I sit

where I can view the sailboats

plunge and come about,

before returning.

I see them safely into

dock, and then come home.

Only home is not

home. I hear the rising wind

whine in the rigging.

“The public is as much intimate as universal, the private is as much universal as intimate.” William Desmond, The Intimate Universal, 39.

I am one of you

in the park on Labor Day

at sundown: crickets,

their sad ecstacy;

the harmonica man, going

over his song list;

the volunteer, dead-

heading pale summer roses;

the patient mother

with impatient child.

Tomorrow time will give back

the rest of our lives.