What the Beard Said (III)

By Peter Cole

is, just now, beyond me
softly—as a kind of mercy?—
here within the fat
book’s saying that						
to ascend’s in fact 							 
to sink into the heart of			
what’s on high beginning 				
with what’s right in front 				 
of our eyes and ears above
all else or else beneath			 
them when they’re close 				
to being closed to dying 
to the world we go 
now now it isn’t so					
hard to imagine something
coming from nothing and not
for nothing as they say it
might just be your lucky day				
or maybe someone else’s nothing
come to something or 
something to naught is what I 
thought I heard there in what the				
beard (softly) seemed to be saying

Peter Cole’s new book of poems, Draw Me After, will be published by Farrar, Straus
and Giroux this fall.