The Tensile Strength of Grace
—Pulse gay nightclub shooting
Orlando, June 12, 2016
It goes like this:
Dawn air tense
as I press against the sand,
abrasion my release and reminder:
Then: By what right do I
inflect such loss as though it were
my wholeness torn asunder:
Grief swelling like the jagged
bit of damned that is
no hand in the horror but comfort,
the pulse I can still call my own,
as though the infinitesimal
mass of a pronoun
might divert the chemical truth:
It goes like this:
Mist shrouding
the trees on the bluff,
just enough to make me sense
what I cannot see — beauty,
by virtue of its absence,
the stain on this morning:
The way the dogwood, bereft
of its riotous surge, feathers
into otherness, into spaces
as beyond me as the cry
that ten minutes earlier
split my lips: It goes like this:
I am straining to stay,
to swim this particular stream of now
before now is no longer,
before God give me any drug but this
resumes its vigilance
& I am lost to the currents
that feed every harbor
but the one where I can actually
feel: Valor
as piercing as the treachery
of a haven that suddenly
held none, of the assailant
whose heart could only translate
anguish into anguish: Last
comes the skin
that pins itself to the conscience:
My wholeness is torn asunder,
even as the bodies that surrender
to the soft Orlando earth
know nothing of my grief:
It goes like this:
I have no fucking idea how it goes