What is Meant by Failure

What is desire? What is failure?
I have long thought of the latter
as what is in our hands and palms:
here are the wrinkles that, like leaves,
do not stop coming, do not seem to,
but seem to be, must be meaning, almost,
failure and more failure. Listen:
here is the song that is not really a song;
here are the trees that, all this time,
have seemed but have not / been dying.
What seems like failure is not failure.
I know that. It's the subtler signs,
not the swan that raped the woman
but the stillness, the palms becoming wrinkled,
the slow, weak blow of a trumpeter
not a trumpeter. So says the heart,
a truth to which the swans come, desire
come, plucking each feathered wing off
the swan's reddening cargo.