Learning to Forgive

from Field Stones
by Robert Kinsley

If your body was the only body, singular, point of,
referential for the world, the past, the present, future
stirring under your eyelids in cobalt blue.

What could you say then to the laying of a finger,
to the feel of the pulse of everyone - like absolution:

for the woman on dialysis, the slow drip of urine,
for the loss in a heart of the spirit, of the will,

or for the man with his gun
for turning it slowly in his hand,
for his wife bloody, and dead on their bed,

for the children of his children who will one day
inevitably turn to a life of crime.

And these are not scattered incidents,
not influence by the likes of the moon,
this is the pulse-rate, the date-line, humming in,
late night, the T.V. monitor in its soft white glow.

Everywhere it's about to be morning, this edge where we stand,
afraid of the mirror, afraid of our own sorrow, the words
wagging and wagging as if we were speaking in tongues.