Grace, Fallen from. Marianne Boruch

love. How is it

      that time has

      layers and layers,

      some of which never move

      or fill up. Meanwhile: a favorite word

      any poem understands to be

      snow’s most legendary suggestion.

      The second: melt.

      The third: I need to

      freeze first.

      STUDYING HISTORY

      Not the underwater goggles to see

      great distances, not the let’s pretend

      of the museum’s “Street of Yesteryear,”

      its candy’s single stripes in jars, life-sized

      dummy at the counter,

      stiff collar and apron, eyes skewed to retrieve

      his blank good will. Nor is it

      book after book of the same war

      over remembered time, the old nun called it,

      speeded up for the test. Wars of different

      colors, weaves and counterweaves,

      different surgical instruments, different

      agonies via different

      far-off blasts, different endlessly

      pointless outcomes, different

      tiny viruses ingesting

      the lungs first, derailing trains there,

      breath starting and stopping

      at each smoky depot.

      I sat at a desk

      where we all sat. I opened

      that book of flags. Once a woman took up

      a whole half page, looming there,

      middle of the 19^th century, absolutely

      glacial because happiness is momentary

      and eternity is work, the camera

      shrouded, laying

      its slow black against white until her

      terrible face found me.

      Was that

      childhood going on? That noise

      in the background—half-starved, deranged bird,

      half Hallelujah Chorus sung

      by the whole town, bad tenors included? Ache

      of cold metal on the playground,

      one glove lost forever, night,

      hours of it, caught

      by a streetlight?

      Which is simply

      the past. In that book now, isn’t it?

      And a child is writing

      his name in the flyleaf, under two or three

      other names, the book already underlined,

      half-forgotten. Write clearly,

      write in ink, the teacher is saying.

      AFTER THE MOON

      eclipsed itself, the rumor of darkness

      true, the whole radiant business

      almost over, only a line,

      an edge, like some

      stray part of a machine

      not one of us

      can figure any more:

      what it thrashed or cut, what it sewed

      quietly together, what it scalded

      or brought back from the dead. After this,

      I came inside to sleep.

      But it’s the moon still,

      pale run of it shaping

      the door closed against the half-lit hall.

      The eye is its own

      small flicker orbiting under the lid

      a few hours.

      Not so long,

      bright rim,

      giving up its genius

      briefly, mountains under dark, craters

      where someone, then no one

      is walking.

      A MUSICAL IDEA

      At the second light, you turn, the boy tells me.

      I turn. A musical idea. Turn then,

      when a light in any house goes on.

      Dark end of the day on the street. Dark

      late afternoon in November.

      In any kitchen—revealed: the hum

      starts in the freezer, down

      the lower shelves, takes the stove back

      to its fire. The sink is an absence,

      one tea-stained cup left to seed.

      I live somewhere. But to walk away

      is a musical idea. Because a corner means

      make a profile to however once

      you were. Once a child, I kept turning

      full-faced into everything, never

      saying a word. You like

      to think that, my brother says. I heard you

      plenty of times. And you were hiding.

      OMNISCIENCE

       To shrink down and not be small

      but just to see again, he said

      of the past, the past as broken mirror,

      as weird-looking stick

      because this was the woods,

      halfway through the hike.

       To refrain from the cheesy, the self-serving, from

      knowing too much. That voice,

      his again. So there were rules. But how can we

      know too much, she said. Memory,

      she said, come on, it’s all about

       forgetting. Think of the things

       lost to make that box

      of odds and ends. They

      kept walking. Somewhere, a real road. They could

      hear it. He almost told her,

      you’ll test me now. You’ll ask me

      how long did it take

      to hold a pencil, to write the word

      fabulous or maybe just dog

      for the first time. And if he

      shook