Rain In the Hills

       

Rich Bowman

Rain In the Hills

The dead stay with you always
taking house-room, finding in you
their haven and harbour, and this happens
even though you know their going sealed off
for you a segment of the whole circle
of things and now wherever you walk there is
some part of the hills and sky
you do not see, though it is not
obscured by the seasons or weather:

but where you are, in this impaired place,
they also remain and are necessary
and beautiful as the thundery light
over the black spurs on an evening
of spring rain; and being there
they will change, not as images
of yourself but in their own way,
allowing you to perceive them

Even the terrible deaths you believed
would shrink your heart forever
do not come to an end or leave you,
for you cannot repudiate your suffering
- it is in you, it is what you have become:
the limited world of loss is still
your support, your delight, and as real
as this hill angled with black stone
and the violet clouds above it -

they are yours, stately and strange
as they are, holding your defeat
and your knowledge of defeat, which is also
entirely at home in you, in how you
watch and speak, in your composition,
your nerve pathways, your membranes
and cells. This is the chemistry of pain.

Lauris Edmond

 

I can attest to the truth of this poem. 

Is it possible that death adds subtraction to us, that loss or absence takes on shape and mass in us?

 

 I don't understand it, but there it is.