Poetry by Bruce Bond from our Spring 2017 issue.
You hear it best where the key turns minor
and enters a field you did not know was there,
but it was always there, you think, this star,
day or night, this jewel in the mine,
always a wilderness that pulls from earth
its slow dark architectural progress.
A boat slips beneath the harbor bridge
a letter that says, by the time you get this,
I will be gone. And yet you read there
some tender argument: know that I am
thinking of you. Or: please, be not afraid.
The mere mention of fear sounds its own
danger, alone in the harbor, flagged in mist.
Wherever music goes farthest, deepest,
you hear the speaker trapped inside it,
longing to be clear. And it is that failure
that is clearest, the hesitant strength,
hope and its refusals, that phrase the matter.
It is the need to be there, among the lost,
that carves the marble of all things here.
Image: Motherwell, Robert. “Elegy to the Spanish Republic No. 70.” 1961. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
