September Is

By Mary Jo Bang

September is work to the center

Of arguments and controversies.

Prejudgments and incomprehensions.

What will I love if not that

That was enigma?

The years of infancy, Memory says,

And there we are, with the demon

Of the art of living

Traced on the glass of some window.

In the beauty of the night of May,

Clear of moon, to the lume of a candle

There was a design like the profile

Of a landscape almost abandoned. Gone

But not gone yet. It's fascinating,

These mysterious uncovered feelings.

Enigma of an afternoon of autumn, the picture

Of which is a composition

Of the eye of my mind. Every hour

That I watch this picture

I see again still that moment.

Nevertheless the moment is an enigma

For me, in how much is inexplicable.

The physical things hide in the architecture

Of the event. The enigma of a mock-up,

Of a shadow, the spectral and eternal aspect

Of the moment. Praises to you for being

One great box of surprise,

Your head the scene of a wonderful theater

Of the most tender gray of the fog

That joins the sky to the earth.

A tangling of truth and memory,

Mythology and iconography,

I watch with the eye

Of the mind the city that accommodates

That one beautiful day that is now infinite.

It deepens. It begins. The cyclical method.

Memory is deeply not alive; it's a mock-up

And this renders it hateful. Yet, it is not a fiction,

Is a truth, indeed a sad and monstrous truth.

I was assigned to you, together we were

A beautiful and melancholic picture.

This last picture is the realization

Of the overwhelming moment

In which the acute eye perceives you as a now

That is over. A now that is fixed

In the swept past.

Copyright Credit: Mary Jo Bang, "September Is" from Elegy. Copyright © 2007 by Mary Jo Bang. Reprinted by permission of Graywolf Press.

Source: Elegy (Graywolf Press, 2007)