Coda

     Joseph Fasano

 

Finally, at the end of every wreckage, we stand here

in these doomed rooms in the moonlight

and tell ourselves we’ve done what we have wanted.

 

We say grief 

is the worn boats in the harbor, 

waiting to carry us to another shore.  

 

If the heart, the dark heart

is the empty page, we say love is the sea itself 

with its voices, troubling the margin 

 

as it rises, turning us

like a story we can't fathom.

This is the way, we say, the only way.

 

And if one day 

we should waken 

in the wreckage,

 

if we should turn back to the dark heave 

of the harbor

and see nothing but the sea wind, the winters,

 

what does it matter

if it can't last, 

if the journey, the way here, lies in ruins,

 

if the old life lies in carnage on the dark shore?

The men among the lilies 

were our fathers; the hymns

 

we didn't open were our children; our mothers 

were the light we didn't learn.                                                

Listen, the wind sings.  Listen.

 

Then we remember

that the body sings, that the lonely

have always been lonely,

 

that the troubled world is the rubble 

of nothing — and that the singing, the singing                                              

in the rigging, that soft song

 

in the cargo of our own hearts

is the one hymn, the one hymn 

of the living, that luminous music 

 

of departure, which is all we may know of return.