Another Night in the Ruins

Lush, Brooklyn, NY. Summer 2008

While packing my things into boxes, I found  a book beneath my bed and turned to a page that read the following poem by Galway Kinnel.  I'm leaving Brooklyn on my dad's birthday, August 27th. 

    1

In the evening

haze darkening on the hills,

purple of the eternal,

a last bird crosses over,

‘flop flop,’ adoring

only the instant.

    2

Nine years ago,

in a plane that rumbled all night

above the Atlantic,

I could see, lit up

by lightning bolts jumping out of it,

a thunderhead formed like the face

of my brother, looking down

on blue,

lightning-flashed moments of the Atlantic.

    3

He used to tell me,

“What good is the day?

On some hill of despair

the bonfire

you kindle can light the great sky—

though it’s true, of course, to make it burn

you have to throw yourself in ...”

    4

Wind tears itself hollow

in the eaves of these ruins, ghost-flute

of snowdrifts

that build out there in the dark:

upside-down ravines

into which night sweeps

our cast wings, our ink-spattered feathers.

    5

I listen.

I hear nothing. Only

the cow, the cow of such

hollowness, mooing

down the bones.

    6

Is that a

rooster? He

thrashes in the snow

for a grain. Finds

it. Rips

it into

flames. Flaps. Crows.

Flames

bursting out of his brow.

    7

How many nights must it take

one such as me to learn

that we aren’t, after all, made

from that bird that flies out of its ashes,

that for us

as we go up in flames, our one work

is

to open ourselves, to be

the flames?

Galway Kinnell, “Another Night in the Ruins”