Its scaffolds -- street after street --
halls leading to halls,
rooms papered with distance
as if heaven were only perspective,
a vanishing point drawing us
until we vanished. And if
I am crying, it's for small things:
staplers, bowls, gloves, spoons
on their pedestals, their ideal forms
lost at the ends of corridors --
for Music in its winged box,
Math's fulcrum and see-saw,
Geography's colored pins, its there, there.
How did we ever come to think
the single world was precious,
the model for us to love --
one town, one house, one sky,
one woman, the mole on her back --
when it is the universe, its gaps,
the mileage between its outposts,
God loves and is his image?
They weren't lies after all, the stories
where we are transmuted into stars
or into water lost in the infinity
of itself. Who could have imagined
God's need for distance,
his hurling us away to be near him?
