Crying for Help as We Climb
Everything is fragile here,
with a ferocious frailty.
We are at the edge of death.
Perhaps not of life,
but some terrible end.
Precipiced here,
and teetering.
Could we use our limbs
to hold,
chances are we might survive.
But in the strangle
of their grasping
we will not last.
We ask what can be done,
send out echoes
with no return.
We’re alone here
on this craggy pivot,
next move yours
next move mine.
once…well, you know how memory is…always
once isn’t the only time you have to tell,
there’s always now, or then, or maybe;
even something further along and deep.
the key is to exercise your telling, and
continue discarding what you cannot keep.
N Filbert
“A man can give up smoking
and the movies, and live for years
hearing the wind tick over roofs
but never looking up from
his one page, or the tiny
life he keeps carving over and
over upon it. And when everyone
around him dies, he can move
a grand piano into
his house, and sit down
alone, and finally play,
certain that no one will
overhear him, though he plays
as loud as he can,
so that when the dead come
and take his hands off the keys
they are invisible, the way air
and music are not.”
-Larry Levis, from The Double
difficulty
others have already said the words
i had so wanted to say to you here
in these pages where I hoped we could meet
and talk about things as if they mattered
for someone other than us, more than
ears waiting to hear what we will say
aiming this pen to the paper now
seeking to turn back
toward home where we knew
what we wanted to find when we
set out however long ago, when our
eyes first opened, and sound we heard
the first time, the first time we spoke
N Filbert
