She had a vision of the vowels of doves
floating like snow in a common dawn,
not so much freed from gravity, she said,
as in league with it, a slow, deliberate dance
of chance and law.
She spoke of loneliness as a kind of sleep,
nocturnal sorrows that mark the mind
as lightly and palpably as prints in damp sand.

We cannot eat an image, we cried.
Say it: what must we do to be saved?

There was a man, she said, who all one night
beside a lake that glimmered darkly kneeled
because within him there worked 
some stricken and almost animal thing
whose need, he knew, he was. He stilled his heart.
He willed away the small rustlings and retreats
behind him with the thought, he thought, of God. 
But when the dawn resolved, and the lake enlightened,
uneasily he rose, pierced by the thirsts 
that he had hindered.

A rumble went among us, glancingly, 
like a flame flickering limb to limb in a stand 
too wet to catch. 

Remember the arctic eyes and pain-seamed face
of the old woman selling flowers on the subway?
The girl so glowing she seemed a nimbus of herself? 
Remember the rain that random afternoon
plock plocking on the roof above you where you lay,
matching the lassitude that it released?
Look hard enough, look lightly enough,
and the un-looked-at world looks back at you.
That reciprocal seeing is the site of soul.

And the man, we clamored, who set himself ablaze
outside the embassy, that animate lick and jag 
that danced him back to ash? And the shining child 
crushed in the push for flour? Are these lights to light
the caves of our unconsciousness? 

Darkness then. She led us to a steep bluff
that overlooked the blister city
with its maddening sanity of highrises and highways 
black lattices of train tracks like legible scars
row after row of lights implying lives each seeking to be
itself in a mud of dread and wasted days and said
within affliction there remains a space, 
within that space a means of reaching free,
a solidarity of solitudes
forged and refined by the fires that are ours. 
A soul can die, but it requires consent.

Beneath us glittered the endless city.
Above us struggled the unpolluted stars.
It’s time, she said, you are ready, and vanished back
into the multitude before we could think 
to ask who we were, or for what.