"The Return" by Bruce Bond

Sorry, guys! This was supposed to be posted exactly 25 minutes ago, yesterday.

The Return
Bruce Bond

In memory of Giles Mitchell

As if the world we wake to,
glowing at the seams, were more
loyal than the one we leave,
more compelled, returning,
true, we say, as if a crime
or arrow, the path it takes,
the deadlier the truer,
the vision of a star pinned
and burning as the star goes out.

One more sleepless man at dawn
puts down his revolver,
closes it in his chest
of drawers. Its weight is that
of the moon sliding down,
an ache withdrawing
into the ephemera of days
to come. He chooses
with every breath and so lives

the burden, free, renewing
his allegiance step by step.
Who am I to presume the world
has a thing yet to tell him?
Still I want to say something,
as we all must, to recover
what it was that made life
the child he swore to spare, to care for,
to leave his minor fortune.

To recover, as in the body
recovered, the gold bullet
of the sun, all good things received
and covered, shrouded in light.
Long ago tomorrow was everything to me.
I loved it the way a small room
loves an only window,
the farthest reaches, the fever
of daylight as it rises and falls.

What is it to be so loosely in your skin,
so ill-defined who knows
what's there to give away?
Once, every wind blew its spiced and drunken rumours
through me. If I talked in my sleep,
it's just that I wasn't sure
if I was listening. Long ago
I loved the future the way a wick
loves the fire that eats it.

And so my first, my particular
flame, the girl whose bewildered
self emerged in the slow
shapes of deep water swells,
the kind that never break.
If not charity, then her distant
sister, that tentative step
and the sound it made, my ear
pressed to the rising sternum.

Not without our gaffs and stumbles,
those night entangled
in the backs of cars,
the petty words that hung in the air
waiting for a mouth
to cover them up.
And all around us a wreath of crickets.
Going out, we called it,
the way a light goes out.

To throw a light into the life
you choose, into the one who chooses,
the mirrored mirror of the physical
eye, into the swift of not quite
knowing who, what, where
choice ends, the sea begins;
to make yourself a false promise
and watch the tidal rip of it
draw back into your aging eyes—

this too is one of those mornings,
how the surface of the screen
reappears at the movie's end,
though something more terrifying
is beginning and we know it,
something rising out of the body
looking down now on the plain
strangeness, the singularity,
of the body, our body, of anyone's body.

As children we could hardly look
to see our president wave, so slowly
pulled in his long convertible
splitting the cheer of a day in Texas.
Then that sound like a slapping
of books. The spits of flesh.
Over and over we watched it
as if the recurring footage might
reconcile a nation with its facts.

Anger, yes, and disbelief,
the blur of objects held too close,
but beyond that: it was the first
I saw my teacher as someone
more, history's orphan, close
to a child, unsteady as she broke
the news, her voice so small,
so soft at times it seemed
she was speaking to herself.

Foolish as it sounds,
it was just then beginning to dawn,
not simply the flash of one broad day,
how it lowered a silence
the size of a cathedral,
but more: how the world that shook
my teacher and her brittle English
was, if not our world,
the frightened one that we would inherit.

The first I heard of Vietnam
it was a television show my parents watched.
Me too as the time advanced,
as it fell in bolts of black cloth
over a family down the street.
Every morning the sun rose
on the jungle of who we thought we were,
what we lost, what we had become.
Even those who returned never returned.

What is more certain than the thing
of which we know so little?
Limousines drive the fresh dead
in caskets draped in fields of stars
so that the sky would drink up
the phantoms in their boxes,
calling them home, we say,
as if it were the living who live
as exiles in the new world.

Imagine the Tibetian children,
how the New China instructed them
t bring what each had killed
to school. It was their work:
one point for a fly, two a mouse,
three a bird, a cat, and so on,
anything to break the life cycle
of the heart, how they threw it
into each small suffering thing.

I don't pretend to know the luminous
emptiness of what they see,
to have what it takes to step lightly
through the labyrinth of Bardos
and back. Still I admire anyone
who, as the story goes, chooses
to return to life, whose kind ghost
reawakens, an infant in the flesh
of day, flushed and crying.

And looking down on all sides, the joy
of arrival. So quiet, this joy,
so easy to dispel with the need for joy,
I am reluctant now to speak of it.
Fr those who wait, it seems to come
from a great distance, returning the way
a father does after years at sea,
his too large coat and the hat he holds
doused in the indigent rain.

True, we say, as of one returning
but also of the eros of the return.
Why is it always one woman now
balancing the scales of my head?
My north, my wife, my nocturnal iris,
each night a little smaller
in her skin, she whom the curtain
turns to in its blindness.
So quick to fall asleep.

A gift, how faithfully she takes
the dishevelment of days
inside, expecting just as surely
to return, as if she saw it: the future
had arrived without closing its eyes,
its distance, as if anything so
shy, so alive, could be
before her, still and breathing,
calling her name.