Here and Now by Peter Balakian

"When I tell you the day is a poem"

Here and Now

by Peter Balakian

The day comes in strips of yellow glass over trees.
 
When I tell you the day is a poem
I’m only talking to you and only the sky is listening.
 
The sky is listening; the sky is as hopeful
as I am walking into the pomegranate seeds
of the wind that whips up the seawall.
 
If you want the poem to take on everything,
walk into a hackberry tree,
then walk out beyond the seawall.
 
I’m not far from a room where Van Gogh
was a patient—his head on a pillow hearing
the mistral careen off the seawall,
 
hearing the fauvist leaves pelt
the sarcophagi. Here and now
 
the air of the tepidarium kissed my jaw
and pigeons ghosting in the blue loved me
 
for a second, before the wind
broke branches and guttered into the river.
 
What questions can I ask you?
How will the sky answer the wind?
 
The dawn isn’t heartbreaking.
The world isn’t full of love.

First Published in Ozone Journal (The University of Chicago Press, 2015). Reprinted with permission.