June 26, 2009Mahler in New YorkJoseph Fasano

Now when I go out, the wind pulls me

into the grave. I go out

to part the hair of a child I left behind,

and he pushes his face into my cuffs, to smell the wind.

If I carry my father with me, it is the way

a horse carries autumn in its mane.

If I remember my brother,

it is as if a buck had knelt down

in a room I was in.

I kneel, and the wind kneels down in me.

What is it to have a history, a flock

buried in the blindness of winter?

Try crawling with two violins

into the hallway of your father’s hearse.

It is filled with sparrows.

Sometimes I go to the field

and the field is bare. There is the wind,

which entrusts me;

there is a woman walking with a pail of milk,

a man who tilts his bread in the sun;

there is the black heart of a mare

in the milk—or is it the wind, the way it goes?

I don’t know about the wind, about the way

it goes. All I know is that sometimes

someone will pick up the black violin of his childhood

and start playing—that it sits there on his shoulder

like a thin gray falcon asleep in its blinders,

and that we carry each other this way

because it is the way we would like to be carried:

sometimes with mercy, sometimes without.