Little X's and Extravagant Adoration

Last year for a while I was inspired by poetry again, because I fell in love, but also because I fell in love with someone who seemed to be awakened in the same way. I posted a poem or two to my Facebook timeline every day, almost all love poems, for weeks. 

This next poem is a death poem that I also posted during that time, followed by an extravagantly adoring Amy Lowell. 

Little Xs

Unexpectedly this October afternoon, the telescope turns,
I see myself, made small again, through its objective lens:

I am not the widower, who recently buried my wife,
Nor the dutiful son who kept vigil while my father,
Like a punch-drunk boxer, fought to out-fox death,

Demented and enraged, hands trapped in cartoon gloves
To stop him pulling out the tube to his morphine pump.

Today we clear the house where he lived for sixty years.
In the bedroom where I was born, my siblings recall

How, as children, their only clue to my birth occurring
Behind this closed door were anxious instructions to pray.

When we open up the attic we discover the suitcase
My mother packed for her last trip into hospital:

A wash-bag and talc, clothes she never got to wear home,
A purse crammed with prayers and the folded letter
I wrote, as a ten-year-old, for my sister to bring into her.

I spend one page telling her how good I'm being, then cram
Three pages with scrawled Xs—each one to represent a kiss.

Last week a granddaughter she never knew sang on stage,
Luminous and radiant, in a band named Little Xs for Eyes.

For four decades in a letter in a purse in a suitcase in this attic
These galaxies of Xs were the banished eyes of a bewildered child.

But—unfolding them—I see myself stare out at who I am now,
Across this life I could never have envisaged as I scrawled
Untidy Xs for a woman I last saw smiling from a hospital bed,

Who sealed them in her purse when nurses shaved her head
In preparation for the operation she would never recover from:

Praying that one day I might open her purse and be surprised
To find my Xs returned to me: big Xs for kisses, little Xs for eyes.

--- Dermot Bolger

In Excelsis

You -- you --
Your shadow is sunlight on a plate of silver;
Your footsteps, the seeding-place of lilies; 
Your hands moving, a chime of bells across a windless air.

The movement of your hands is the long, golden running of light from a rising sun;
It is the hopping of birds upon a garden-path.

As the perfume of jonquils, you come forth in the morning.
Young horses are not more sudden than your thoughts,
Your words are bees about a pear-tree,
Your fancies are the gold-and-black striped wasps buzzing among red apples.
I drink your lips,
I eat the whiteness of your hands and feet.
My mouth is open,
As a new jar I am empty and open.
Like white water are you who fill the cup of my mouth,
Like a brook of water thronged with lilies.

You are frozen as the clouds,
You are far and sweet as the high clouds.
I dare to reach to you,
I dare to touch the rim of your brightness.
I leap beyond the winds,
I cry and shout,
For my throat is keen as is a sword
Sharpened on a hone of ivory.
My throat sings the joy of my eyes,
The rushing gladness of my love.

How has the rainbow fallen upon my heart?
How have I snared the seas to lie in my fingers
And caught the sky to be a cover for my head? How have you come to dwell with me,
Compassing me with the four circles of your mystic lightness,
So that I say "Glory! Glory!" and bow before you
As to a shrine?

Do I tease myself that morning is morning and a day after?
Do I think the air is a condescension,
The earth a politeness,
Heaven a boon deserving thanks?
So you -- air -- earth -- heaven --
I do not thank you,
I take you,
I live.
And those things which I say in consequence
Are rubies mortised in a gate of stone.

--Amy Lowell

One of the things I miss, of how many things. A great many.