It is Very Often as Though

We live softly damned, damnation
a small thing built into the body. All
around us: apples and auguries, poems

that speak the small prayers which keep
a weary heart singing. And when we
grasp that small music, incomplete,

approximate, fallible as the body of flesh
that lives to bear it, we can rise up, oh —
we rise and we damn near catch fire.











From Poetry Magazine, Vol. 184, no. 5, Sept. 2004. Used with permission.
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