POEM AFTER LIFTING WEIGHTS AT THE DELAWARE FAMILY BRANCH YMCA OF BUFFALO, NEW YORK, JULY 1, 2019

I

When I closed my eyes I saw something.
Light on waves, lit lines
                                    back there blighting the dark

brightly writing and dissolving notes like
fractured hexagons or yellow alphabets.

And it was a private beauty, a salve.
Which I deranged by seeing.

What hot marigolds behind my eyes
caused a shadowed and voltaic air.

What neon seagulls going home back there
black lake after black lake or wet
                               mountain crests walking at dawn

lifted my body into upper air
                              on the flooded high fibers of light.

Which were given without my asking
an unbearable gift from God
                                                  I nevertheless require.

II

Not linesmith or fibersmith; no nickname yet
for a maker of needles, but the brass-plated hinge

on the slow door of my childhood bedroom
did faithfully purchase the waking mind each night

by pressing onto the floor a golden needle.
Here is the light needle spanning the basin

breaking over the bedshelf and back for my heart.
The nightly needle seeking the nightly eye

and here its fine stitch in blue iris.
Then “Only You” from a little clock radio
which is when
thought leaves like wet egrets

wingtips waking briefly the signatures
the returning dead put down at dawn.

III

The man opens eyes among bells and plates
and bikes that go nowhere but inward.

Yea he says, “It will be fine
if I can just recall this…”

IV

By Persephone’s bright black roses
your poetry will fail you

on the day your heart is desolated.

But try, or damn you all—

Bring out the hot blossoms from your nimbus brain
all footspilled, lift up the torn embroidery.

Stranded in that horseshit home
Built of your every sound—

Can the ghost of beauty be held into grief’s beating river?
This is it. Do you see it? You have been asked

in the time you read this poem, as I am,
to walk down the path of grief, eyes forward.

V

You are the ghost
and the machine
and the ghost
in the machine.

Yet you are the loss of all three,
not the moment after the loss.

Go on and find your city there.

Luke Daly lives in Buffalo, New York and teaches writing at Rochester Institute of Technology. You can find more of his work in Subtropics, Cream City Review, and Basalt.