The Tensile Strength of Grace

                                                —Pulse gay nightclub shooting, Orlando

It goes like this:

Dawn air tense
as I press against the sand,

abrasion my release and reminder:

Then: By what right do I
inflect such loss as though it were

my wholeness torn asunder:

Grief swelling, jagged
bit of damned that is

no hand in the horror but comfort,

the pulse I can still call my own,
as though the infinitesimal

mass of a pronoun

might divert the chemical truth:
It goes like this: Mist

shrouding the trees on the bluff,

just enough to make me sense
what I cannot see — beauty

by virtue of its absence

the stain on this morning:
The way the dogwood, bereft

of its riotous surge, feathers

into otherness, into spaces
as beyond me as the cry

that ten minutes earlier

split my lips: It goes like this:
I am straining to stay,

to swim this particular now

before now is no longer,
before God give me any drug but this

resumes its vigilance

and I am lost to the currents
that feed every harbor

but the one where I can actually

feel: Valor
as piercing as the haven

that suddenly held none, the assailant

whose heart could only translate
anguish into anguish:

Last comes the skin

that pins itself to the conscience:
My wholeness is torn asunder,

even as the bodies that surrender

to the soft Orlando earth
know nothing of my grief:

It goes like this: