poetry

At Parting in Duncker Hall
by Ricardo M. de Ungria

Bunkered in the belly of day, we fasted
between book covers and read between the lines.
“When the mind is exalted, the body
is lightened.”

                       And so between the hammers
of our hearts and the basement water bubbling
Its way to the drain a couplet away
From our chairs, we broke bread and chewed verses
From Anonymous to Adrienne Rich.
Out of the many meanings we fished
Our truths and threw them back in, the way it was
Supposed to be, the only way for them
To live against our own disunities.
In the final week, the poem stepped outside
Its English, yet remained undiminished
By the many tongues it spoke and the perfect,
Though less plain, senses it made that we mapped
All the way from Charleyville and Paris
To Duino via Andalusia, and thence
To the Five Sacred Peaks of T’ang China.
We knew then how infinitely elsewhere
can sit in our midst and be the color
green, or a lifted arm, or a part of speech.
Unquenchable, we sent no postcards back.
Through the basement windows broke the mottled
schemes of summer and the end of summer,
its lease of twitterings, sprinklers and lawn mowers
like gilt on a rare book’s sides and edges.
Cut grass in its whitest hour exhumed
the dreams of Basho’s warriors and Larkin’s
lanes of Queen Anne’s lace?the way the wind
outside the library once tore through our Donne
contentiously and we stood up to confute.
We could have minded so much the intrusion,
but such feather quickly finds its cap and is off,
leaving us to the words at had to incur
life everlasting and its brief rewards.
We have worn away worlds back to their sands.

The mountains and molehills we raised?may they
keep their airy nothings and we our earth.
Through the glass of these translations darkly,
the poems sits still and waits, like the moonlight
at the foot of his bed which Li Po mistook
for early frost and made him think of home.

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