You, Therefore

by Reginald Shepherd

For Robert Philen

You are like me, you will die too, but not today:   

you, incommensurate, therefore the hours shine:   

if I say to you “To you I say,” you have not been   

set to music, or broadcast live on the ghost   

radio, may never be an oil painting or 

Old Master’s charcoal sketch: you are 

a concordance of person, number, voice, 

and place, strawberries spread through your name   

as if it were budding shrubs, how you remind me   

of some spring, the waters as cool and clear 

(late rain clings to your leaves, shaken by light wind),   

which is where you occur in grassy moonlight:   

and you are a lily, an aster, white trillium 

or viburnum, by all rights mine, white star   

in the meadow sky, the snow still arriving 

from its earthwards journeys, here where there is   

no snow (I dreamed the snow was you, 

when there was snow), you are my right, 

have come to be my night (your body takes on   

the dimensions of sleep, the shape of sleep   

becomes you): and you fall from the sky 

with several flowers, words spill from your mouth 

in waves, your lips taste like the sea, salt-sweet (trees   

and seas have flown away, I call it 

loving you): home is nowhere, therefore you,   

a kind of dwell and welcome, song after all,   

and free of any eden we can name