On Virginity

window
bancroft's castle
groton, mass

On Virginity

Your exact errors make a music

that nobody hears. 

           

                                                                You and Art

                                                                William Stafford

Maybe when we actually come to

the deciding side of the road

its already been made up for us

and all that groping in the dark

dust all that grunting up hill

toward the summit comes to nothing

but what all along we knew but didn’t

have sight eyes for.  But inside

in those cave places we say we wait

to rest and eat and find our way

we are being made: famous or fool

and getting out we don’t know the day

of the month or the time of day

or even what year it might be.  We got

a body one man told me it’s all

we got, a body and we walk it if we can

or wheel it or sit it or someone

does it for us a while, but what

we are if we’re not water in a scorch-

bucket and cool coals in a forge

after the bellows-wind mouths his

seduction on the skin  of our blade

and maybe if we’re gifted, or maybe just

used, we can know when, lifted up and glow-

plug red, we’ll be laid

against the anvil and hammered we’ll be

babychild we’ll be three or thirty

three we’ll be handled none-the-less

and taken out into the world to strike

or be stricken, we’ll be sharp 

until we’re dull or tainted, until

we’re left off in a long log in the trees

and found some time later

and pried and praised through all that

grain we’d stayed inside of and knew

like a lover and the scar left

when we’re hauled away, that gaping,

it’s voiceless I say, it is without

a name or a place and it is

wide and beginning its own kind

of quiet until the ants arrive

to make of it, and before that, when

the sap pools enough to spill and that

first drop falls and falls but doesn’t

get to the floor of the forest until

we’ve been taken out and forgotten

ourselves.