For with God nothing shall be impossible – Luke 1:37
If we circle off this world
and call it the Open Wound of God,
its laws will be simple and few.
What is not quixotic will die.
The impossible will often prove true
as brute reality unravels in every dream.
Here, a man and a woman will equal
whatever haven their gestures suggest,
whatever heaven their words create.
A flower the man offers the woman
will look like a handful of snow,
cut from a bed of white peonies.
It’s a simple gesture. He yields
to the flower his unspoken words,
has faith it will speak their intimacies,
soften past regret, tell the woman,
With this we heal. A daughter of Eve,
the woman takes some convincing,
requires touch, taste, to know
her certainties. I hear nothing,
she says. The flower is a riddle of silence.
Exactly, he replies, the very figure
of a man. Infinite possibility takes root
when language flowers from a flower.
The peony spreads solace
over them to drape the wounds
of their world in white lace. Listen,
just listen, the man thinks. Imagine
that altar cloth, its impossible words.
With words, impossible words, we heal.
Douglas L. Talley retired from law and now offers a writers’ workshop for inmates of the Northeast Reintegration Center in Cleveland, Ohio. This poem originally appeared in, or evolved from, his MFA thesis, A Wounded God in Every Mirror. He is married to the novelist A. R. Talley, whose MFA thesis, (and most recent book), Between Sunrise and Sunset, was recently released by Black Rose Writing.
