Taylor Mali's masterly reading of Kinnell's "The Waking"

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http://www.bettinamay.com/poem/2008/10/the-waking-galway-kinnell.html

"The Waking", Galway Kinnell

What just just happened between the lovers,
who lie now in love-sleep under the owls' calls,
call, answer, back and forth, and so on,
until one, calling faster, overtakes the other
and the two whoo together in one
shimmering harmonic -- is called "lovemaking."
Lovers who come exalted to their trysts,
who approach from opposite directions
along a path by the sea, through the pines,
meet, embrace, go up from the sea,
lie crushed into each other under
the sky half golden, half deep-blueing
the moon and stars into shining, know
they don't "make" love, but are earth-creatures
who live and -- here maybe no other word will do --
fuck one another forever if possible across the stars.
An ancient word, formed perhaps before
the sacred and profane had split apart,
when the tongue was like the flame of the heart
in the mouth, and lighted each word
as it was spoken, to remind it
to remember, as when flamingos
change feeding places on a marsh,
and there is a moment, after the first to fly
puts its head into the water in the new place
and before in the old place the last to fly
lifts out its head to see the rest have flown,
when, scattered with pink bodies, the sky
is one vast remembering. They still hear,
in sleep, the steady crushing and uncrushing
of bedsprings; they imagine a sonata in which
violins' lines draw the writhing and shiftings.
They lie with heads touching, thinking
themselves back across the blackness.
When dawn touches the bed their bodies re-form,
heaps of golden matter sieved
out of the night. The bed, caressed threadbare,
worn almost away, is now more than ever
the place where such light as humans
shine with seeps up into us. The eyelids,
which love the eyes and lie on them to sleep,
open. This is a bed. That is a fireplace.
That is last morning's breakfast tray
which nobody has yet bothered to take away.
This face, too alive with feeling to survive past
the world in which it is said, "Ni vous
san moi, ni moi san vous," so unguarded
this day might be breaking in the Middle Ages,
in the illusion fateful randomness chooses
to beam into existence, now, on this pillow.
In a ray of sun the lovers see motes cross,
mingle, collide, lose their way, in this puff
of ecstatic dust. Tears overfill their eyes,
wet their faces, drain quickly away
into their smiles. One leg hangs off the bed.
He is still inside her. His big toe
sticks into the pot of strawberry jam. "Oh migod!"
They kiss while laughing and hit teeth
and remember they are bones and laugh
naturally again. The feeling, perhaps
it is only a feeling, perhaps mostly due
to living only in the overlapping lifetimes
of dying things, that time starts up,
comes over them. They get up, put on clothes,
go out. They are not in the street yet,
however, but for a few minutes longer,
still in their elsewhere, beside a river,
with their arms around each other, in the aura
earth has when it remembers its former beauty.
An ambulance sirens a bandage-stiffened
body towards St. Vincent's. A police car
running red lights parodies
in high pitch the owls of paradise. The lovers
enter the ordinary day the ordinary world
providentially provides. Their pockets ring.
Good. For now askers and beggarmen
come up to them needing change for breakfast.