You and I, we are too far
from fire now: the chimney-pots
have driven out their smoke,
and stood alert for its return,
but flames are rare, or else
they are disaster; our rooms in brick and board
have insulated from the wind
our blood and voices,
so that neither moves inside the wilder air—
those bands of warm and cold, force
and impetus or null
that comes when two great streams oppose
and cancel out; we are
too far from water now, both you and I,
the green of dissolution kissing
wrack to wrack, sun
crisping to the glitter
of the stars; for in the water, night
comes soon, and in the water, there are bands
of cold and warm, and in the one
you die, and in the other, live
but briefly, you and I;
we are too far from earth,
and when we lie down on the grass,
the palm a star, a shadow-bed,
we’ll never know if under us
there creep the fossils of a youth
who died and slumped beneath the earth,
and earth has moved across
his thorax and his thigh; until the air
we are too far from, though within
its stale caress, had brushed the last
of sandstone from his eyes,
and took from bones
the oxygen they kept,
that entered time as expiration,
and enters us as breath.

for Gustaf Sobin, 1935—2005

First published in Miracle of Measure Ascendant: A Festschrift for Gustaf Sobin, eds. Andrew Zawacki and Andrew Joron, Talisman House Press, Jersey City, 2005; republished in Talisman (U.S.), v.30-31, Fall 2005-Winter 2006.