The Largest Possible Life
                        for Ruth and Gladys
                                
Building a fire, love;
bent low      
    over a flame

I am afraid of.
Coaxing passion     
         from dry twigs

and dead leaves,
  the failures of the past, dirty fingers,     
          and a moment of sunset       

huge orange
hangs in one eye--      
       in my breast a sun

which, if I could see it, if I could
know it, would
   light the world

with love.  Then,
an unexpected  memory    
      of my mother in the car, snow piled

along the gray streets
  of Massachusetts.  It was my sixteenth year
            and we were fighting a life

and death struggle over my desire to give
myself away completely to love before
          I had a self to give.

There she was, my block, my barricade,
 my iron grate, my broken door--our one shared
         passion, to hurt each other into truth, and

it was the millionth skirmish
of our everyday war when she said
       "I don't know if I've ever loved anyone,"

and began to weep. Monks sit
  in the middle of  fires
        they set themselves.  They let


their bodies bloom
into suffering,
       in the hope that, like this, they will open

someone's heart.
What do we have to
      see, how close do we need to live by the

beautiful terrible flame of this world,
flame of ourselves, which is
         the same thing?
      
How much anguish do we need to pour
from cup to cup, drink of melted rubies,
       underwater food of the fevers that live

in our blood, in the light of our eyes
where infinite tears are waiting and still
      you say, "Light a white candle," and I do, asking

whoever it is, Teach me to surrender
this mind that grasps at shadows
       when the whole house is ablaze, when the only thing left

is to leap, carrying the impossible
weight in my arms, into
      the heart of our fire, to melt and to bloom.