Harvest

All summer, I prayed
for clarity of sight—light falling
through leaves, a flock of starlings
before rain. . .

Of the psychic, who counseled
repeatedly, that I must become familiar
with love, so as to see its opposite
when it rushed toward me,
those fragments, its song,
linger, rising up, now
and again.

I was to let pain
drain from me like earth,
after rain.

O, obsession, that closed fist.

(Though, here again is mist,
rising off the water just
after dawn…)

Now, Autumn comes early. August leaves
brown in heat. Detritus from the maple
covers the street where
a pearled wasps’ nest glistens
with dew, while wasps drift
hazily in and out.

Like those figures, which cloud the edge
of memory, dissolving each time
in a kind of rain.

How should love feel, when we
receive it?

I think of those late summer walks
through the meadow and the neighboring
meadow, where I
was not longing but the one
who was longed for.



Reprinted from Saints of Little Faith (Four Way Books, 2024) with the permission of the author. The poem was originally published in the Los Angeles Review of Books (LARB Quarterly #37 Fire). All rights reserved.