Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved. Gregory Orr

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СКАЧАТЬ the poets whisper and weep,

      Laugh and lament.

      In a thousand languages

      They say the same thing:

      “We lived. The secret of life

      Is love, which casts its wing

      Over all suffering, which takes

      In its arms the hurt child,

      Which rises green from the fallen seed.”

It’s not magic; it isn’t a trick.

      Every breath is a resurrection.

      And when we hear the poem

      Which is the world, when our eyes

      Gaze at the beloved’s body,

      We’re reborn in all the sacred parts

      Of our own bodies:

      the heart

      Contracts, the brain

      Releases its shower

      Of sparks,

      and the tear

      Embarks on its pilgrimage

      Down the cheek to meet

      The smiling mouth.

Sadness is there, too.

      All the sadness in the world.

      Because the tide ebbs,

      Because wild waves

      Punish the shore

      And the small lives lived there.

      Because the body is scattered.

      Because death is real

      And sometimes death is not

      Even the worst of it.

      If sadness did not run

      Like a river through the Book,

      Why would we go there?

      What would we drink?

Isis kneels on the banks

      Of the Nile. She is assembling

      The limbs of Osiris.

      Her live limbs moving

      Above his dead, moving

      As if in a dance, her torso

      Swaying, her long arms

      Reaching out in a quiet

      Constant motion.

      And the river below her

      Making its own motions,

      Eddies and swirls, a burbling

      Sound the current makes

      As if a throat was being cleared,

      As if the world was about to speak.

The poem is written on the body,

      And the body is written on the poem.

      The Book is written in the world,

      And the world is written in the Book.

      This is the reciprocity of love

      That outwits death. Death looks

      In one place and we’re in the other.

      Death looks there, but we are here.

“What is life?”

      When you first

      Hear that question

      It echoes in your skull

      As if someone shouted

      In an empty cave.

      The same answer each time:

      The resurrection of the body

      Of the beloved, which is

      The world.

      Every poem different but

      Telling the same story.

      And we’ve been gathering

      Them in a book

      Since writing began

      And before that as songs

      Or poems people memorized

      And recited aloud

      When someone asked: “What is life?”

The things that die

      Do not die,

      Or they die briefly

      To be born again

      In the Book.

      Did you think

      You would see

      The loved one again

      In this world

      Or in some other?

      No, that cannot happen.

      But we have been

      Gathering, all of us,

      The scattered remnants

      Of the loved one

      Since the beginning.

      In Egypt, the loved

      One СКАЧАТЬ