Resurrection

Now I understand
When I left for Paris
With sadness in my heart
And pain all over my body,
With dead eyes
And pain in my soul,
Got there in the rain
And sun of September
Solitary and lonely
Got to rue Cels
And walked at night
To Montparnasse or Saint-Germain
And sometimes to the Seine.
I now understand
You had spoken to people,
Told everybody
To be gentle and brave
At the same time,
To let me feel
That it was still possible
The dream and the impossible
That life and love
And passion are stronger
Than the immense stupidity
Which kills us at times.
Then came the winter,
December and January,
As cold at rue Cels
As I had never felt before,
Yet I read, thought and dreamed
In the warmth of something
Only now I understand.
The red leaf that came through my window
In the middle of October.
Was it coming from you or was it you yourself
Coming in October and bringing into Paris
The benchless quiet of the Nevsky Prospect?
For it was then that I thought of Leningrad
As I now do of our child, still not around,
Yet already present, stretching her hands
Toward yours that hold the sun.
Child of war and light,
Of truth and darkness,
And of rebellion.
And you, streets of Paris,
You helped me too
As the voice that persuaded people
Also spoke to the walls
The gardens and sidewalks.
With the coming of Spring
We took walks from Porte de Vincennes
To the Bastille and sat in the sun
And looked at the water
Trying to open our souls.
I prepared myself
For the work in the fields,
Where I felt the infinite
Under my feet and the truth
Of thinking that
Cuts furrows into the soil of Being.
The ontological and cosmic change
We are conceiving,
Her hands, her being, her eyes
In the chiasm of our bodies,
The joy and the dance
Of its autonomous movement.
As I tell you of him
Who died early,
In your beautiful mountains,
Of his painful death,
I descend, fearless,
In the depths of your waters.
In your hands I become a rose,
And you, another rose
That I feel everywhere,
The finite and the infinite,
Our potentia and,
Of course, love.
I'm inside you
And he, whom you'd have loved,
Is inside me, and you are
Inside both of us.
For he came back,
His ashes have risen from the ocean,
Made a body of light
We've felt in our bed,
We've felt inside
As ground for her coming
Into the world.
When out of the ruins,
Out of the black soil,
He gave you his love,
He made possible
Your resurrection
And mine.

New York, February/March 2000
from Figures of a Foreign Land
San Francisco: Deep Forest, 2001