Ending Song

You’d never call the branches

arms, though in certain

lights don’t pine and man

look like hands

conjoined where bark

meets flesh, where man

holds pine to saw

away the rotted limbs

he knows must fall?

And if you’d never call

it luck when you watch him

slip and break his back,

won’t you learn to call it

blessing later, to supple

the muscles of  his

cracking hips, tear

into the edges of  his pain

till they dissolve

up through your arms and you

can’t feel the difference

of  your bodies?

What else to call

a point of rupture

but a join, where you

become another aspect

of the break: we wound

so as to save, we hurt

so as to heal—

What else to know

of  loss but how

a man’s breast might cool

beneath your fingers,

whatever tenderness

that’s left no end

to passion but

its branching out. Oh

wasn’t that the point

of love: to join the end

to its beginning, save

some semblance of a whole

by splitting it to half?

Wasn’t that the hope

with which he sounded out

the weakened wood

before he cut, the care

with which you bound

the fallen branches up

once he let them go?