SEVEN
for luck, and for the seven heavens, transparently stacked
like an archaeological dig into glassworks; we say broad
daylight,but it's also deep. I want to find the stratum where
virtue is pure description: the virtue of mercury
is speed. The virtue of the soul is joy. Break a thermometer
and mercury, so rapid and silver it seems to ride on light,
shatters into mirrors of itself: identical beads, all whole,
all fleeing. The mind's virtue is difference; the heart's,
sameness--deeper than before, this resonance, this tide's
diastole and pulse. The body, in its obstinate formality,
plain under the blue vault endlessly lifting, heavy on the
warming sand--the body's virtue is renewal. Cell after cell
it loses all that it has, and still goes on,
faithful amnesiac lover of the sun,
the sun that says I have not left,
that says I have returned.
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