In the Lateness of the World
Page 3
in utter dark, where not even bats sing, and until
seen from the air by pilots during the Great War,
the domes slept, round and risen in the fields.
They also saw their own jeweled cities, their chess villages,
quilts of crops, and snake of rivers, snow wounded
by wire not seen before, and after the war,
the pilots led engineers to the fields of the domes.
At first no one knew what they were. Nothing was known.
Not that the builders would have been children to them,
nor why they toiled their lives moving stones
for the sun to slip through at a winter dawn,
lighting the spirals, stars, and lozenges
that the artist now transcribes along with wild aurochs,
bison, and the ancient horse. It is not known why
he paints them, standing as he does in a slate blindness—
only that with time, he might decipher a message regarding
aurochs, bison and spirals, lozenges and stars.
A ROOM
There is, on the wall, a scroll of rice paper and silk,
where sixty years ago a monk, after grinding bamboo
ash and the glue of fish bones into a stick, rubbed
the stick into stone and water, brushing a moment
of light from mind to paper. The brush was the cloud
that rains water and ink and nothing it touches can be erased.
On the floor, there is a rug woven from memory
of wool shorn toward the end of spring after the animals
are washed in the river. Its red is from insects that lived
in the bark of oaks, its green the green of fungus
on mulberry trees, its language unknown:
crosses, arrows, the repetition of houses and shoes.
The table near the window was a girl’s dowry chest,
with a wooden statue of Saint Dominic missing an arm,
and a Chinese couple in jade on pedestals of scholar-stone,
he stroking his long beard, hiding a sword behind his back,
she with an unopened lotus bloom over her shoulder,
two small Buddhas carried by hand from Hangzhou.
The blue crystal eggs were blown, then etched by a diamond cutter
who sold them in a city known for its nine-hundred-day siege.
A young man brought the coffee service from a souk:
six glass cups and a silver pot that chimes against a tray beside
books with the chapters Sauntering, Reading, Fencing,
and Idea of Necessary Connexion, warning us against
attributing to objects the internal sensations
they occasion, such as joy at finding the scroll after taking
shelter in a shop on an afternoon lit with fire pots, or relief
that the rug, soaked in the floodwaters that later destroyed
the house, was, in the end, saved by the snow it collected
on a winter night, its memory and the red
of its insects intact, along with, by coincidence, the dowry chest,
the saint, the Chinese couple, Buddhas, and blue eggs,
coffee service, and books chosen at random, as our moments are,
ours and the souls of others, who glimmer beside us
for an instant, here by chance and radiant with significance.
THE GHOST OF HEAVEN
1.
Sleep to sleep through thirty years of night,
a child herself with child,
for whom we searched
through here, or there, amidst
bones still sleeved and trousered,
a spine picked clean, a paint can,
a skull with hair.
2.
Night to night:
child walking toward me through burning maize
over the clean bones of those whose flesh
was lifted by zopilotes into heaven.
So that is how we ascend!
In the clawed feet of fallen angels
to be assembled again
in the workrooms of clouds.
3.
She rose from where they found her lying
not far from a water urn, leaving
herself behind on the ground
where they found her, holding her arms
before her as if she were asleep.
4.
Blue smoke rising from corncribs, the flap of wings.
On the walls of the city streets a plague of initials.
5.
Walking through a firelit river
to a burning house: dead Singer
sewing machine and piece of dress.
Outside a cashew tree wept
blackened cashews over lamina.
Outside paper fireflies rose to the stars.
6.
Bring penicillin if you can, you said, surgical tape,
a whetstone, mosquito repellent but not the aerosol kind.
Especially bring a syringe for sucking phlegm,
a knife, wooden sticks, a clamp, and plastic bags.
You will also need a bottle of cloud for anesthesia:
to sleep like the flight of a crane through colorless dreams.
7.
When a leech opens your flesh, it leaves a small volcano.
Always pour turpentine over your hair before going to sleep.
8.
Such experiences as these are forgotten
before memory intrudes.
The girl was found (don’t say this)
with a man’s severed head stuffed
into her where a child would have been.
No one knew who the man was.
Another of the dead.
So they had not, after all,
killed a pregnant girl.
9.
That sound in the brush?
A settling of wind in sorghum.
10.
If they capture you, talk.
Talk. Please, yes.
You heard me the first time.
You will be asked who you are.
Eventually, we are all asked who we are.
All who come
All who come into the world
All who come into the world are sent.
Open your curtain of spirit.
ASHES TO GUAZAPA
Your cinerary box was light, but filled with you it weighed eight pounds.
Nevertheless, we each wanted our turn carrying you up the mountain.
We passed the roofless chapel, the crater, the graves of the youngest,
the camping place, the secret paths, the impossible stone road.
We came upon the shivering trees where the magical foreign doctor
was said to dig out bullets with a penknife and supply the children
with iron by dipping rusty nails in water. We came upon the past,
where the holes were dug, and if you dug there now you’d fill quite a sack
with bones. We don’t stop to dig there. We carried your box
to another place, not as far as we would have liked, but far enough,
where we all had our pictures taken with you, and then your box
posed with your former truck, that will now belong to the priest
you saved from prison. The truck seemed to know what had happened.
We spent a long time piling stones around the trees, even the mayor
who was once a fighter himself in these
hills piled stones.
Then with cupped hands we tossed your remains into a coppice of cedars.
You flew a little, your soft ash flew, settling on the stones under the trees.
A camouflage moth alighted on the tree where most of you fell, and there
your friend worked his machete until a cross appeared, and within it
a Christ of sap and grain. The moth then vanished into the jacaranda
and dragonflies arrived, hovering, then from nowhere butterflies
rained into the coppice, blue mariposas, as they sometimes do
into the roofless chapel, and as dragonflies whirred above us,
a camouflage moth held still with its wings open, and the mariposas
rose and fell until all was dust and wings—you in flight—leaving
a life without a day not given to others, leaving us to stand
in a sunlit clearing of butterflies and ash where your soul is loosed.
HUE: FROM A NOTEBOOK
We went down the Perfume River by dragon boat
as far as the pagoda of the three golden Buddhas.
Pray here. You can ask for happiness.
We light joss sticks, send votives downriver in paper sacks,
then have trouble disembarking from the boat.
Our bodies disembark, but our souls remain.
A thousand lanterns drift, a notebook opens in the dark
to a page where moonlight makes a sound.
These soldiers are decades from war now:
pewter-haired, steel-haired, a moon caught in plumeria.
We are like the clouds that pass and pass.
What does it matter then if we are not the same as clouds?
There was then the whir of stork wings, and bicycle chains ringing.
It is still now the way the air is still just before the mine explodes.
Once we fired at each other. Now we pass silence back and forth.
On the ten thousand graves, we lay chrysanthemum.
MORNING ON THE ISLAND
The lights across the water are the waking city.
The water shimmers with imaginary fish.
Not far from here lie the bones of conifers
washed from the sea and piled by wind.
Some mornings I walk upon them,
bone to bone, as far as the lighthouse.
A strange beetle has eaten most of the trees.
It may have come here on the ships playing
music in the harbor, or it was always here, a winged
jewel, but in the past was kept still by the cold
of a winter that no longer comes.
There is an owl living in the firs behind us, but he is white,
meant to be mistaken for snow burdening a bough.
They say he is the only owl remaining. I hear him at night
listening for the last of the mice and asking who of no other owl.
A BRIDGE
Behind us a sea-cliff, landfall, ahead the wind,
tar-smoke, the sea, a carrick.
We sway on a bridge between them
above a great shattering. We have left
the verge, our certainty, and walk across
a chasm to the cries of cormorants, fulmars,
the wings of mute swans singing in flight.
Below us bladder wrack, sea froth, and dulse,
sea against rocks in heave and salt, and between
bridge and sea an abyss we cross, as behind us
the headland recedes—cottages and boats, clouds and sheep,
a piping of oystercatchers dying out, and the callings
of kittiwakes preparing to leave their nesting ground.
The bridge rises and falls with our steps, moving in wind
so we must hold fast the ropes
once made of hides and the hair of cows’ tails
hoisted over the silvering salmon as they leapt
into bag nets too heavy to lift, hauled
across this very bridge that rings in wind
like ship’s rigging, volary of rock pipits,
bazaar of guillemots, colony of puffins,
and in the blackest water below us ghosts
of salmon, empty nets, and on the carrick
ruins of boats, nets, buoys, and a fisherman’s bothy.
We have only to keep walking for the bridge to go on.
The carrick is a foothold in the distance, a stone in time.
When we reach it, not only may the salmon return
but you will be alive again, wake me when we reach the carrick.
THE END OF SOMETHING
That summer we lived in the hills near San Gersolè,
where a saint sleeps holding poppies in a glass coffret,
about to unbutton what would have been her wedding dress.
Other than this not much is known about the saint.
This is the church of a thousand years: vineyards,
hummingbirds, swifts, chicory, swallows, bindweed,
and the ringing of bells for liturgy, births, and deaths,
with a flock of bells to tell the village of war or its end.
Mornings we wake to light upon stone, much as the sisters
who lived here in the fourteenth century came from sleep,
swallows foraging from an eternity of eaves.
On the last day, we have our lunch of figs under the lindens.
The lemons are nearly ripe, hanging like ornaments from a lemon branch.
This isn’t our last day, she says. Tomorrow is our last day.
As proof, she offers time singing in the darkness of time.
We are trying to climb to the ruins when my heart gives way.
When my heart gives way in the poppy field I have to turn back.
Before turning back, I press a few poppies in a book.
Before turning back, I take a photograph of no one
standing in a poppy field. I am myself standing.
I ask my mother, thousands of miles away, to help me back.
EARLY LIFE
In Le Détroit du Lac Érié, five years after the end of war, I was born.
My father’s naval uniform hung among our coats and his white cap
flung into the sea at war’s end still then floated on the waves there.
My father built a house for us, working in the dark after his factory shift.
One night a long-buried woman appeared, all fog and bones, passing
through a wall he’d yet to finish. Later we hung a mirror there
and from time to time the fog woman stood behind the mirror looking out.
Beneath a nearby house, there was a cellar where escaping slaves once were hidden.
An underground railroad carried them through a tunnel beneath the fields.
In the mornings the fields hummed their readiness.
In the orchard, apples and apricots appeared in the trees, and in the garden
sudden red cabbage, blue-leaved lilies, endive, and wandering mint.
Over the field crawled squash vine and blossom until a row of berry
canes stood in a cloud of bees, and lettuces opened in watery light.
When Anna was with us, pillows of bread rose in bowls and soup
boiled the windows blind. Anna was from the old country. This was the new one.
Many sentences began with Be quiet now, in voices like birches in snow.
They began their stories when the war ended. Never when the war began.
TAPESTRY
There is no album for these, no white script on black
&n
bsp; paper, no dates stamped in a border, no sleeve, no fire,
no one has written on the back from left to right.
Your hair has not yet fallen out nor grown back—
girl walking toward you out of childhood
not yet herself, having not yet learned to recite
before others, and who would never wish to stand
on a lighted proscenium, even in a darkened house,
but would rather dig a hole in a field and cover herself
with barn wood, earth, and hay, to be as quiet as plums turning.
There is no calendar, no month, no locket, but your name
is called and called in the early storm. No one finds
you, no one ever finds you. Not in a small grave
dug by a child as a hiding place, nor years
later in the ship’s hold. Not in the shelter, nor high
on the roof as the man beside you leapt, not
in a basket crossing a vineyard, nor in a convent
kitchen on the last night, as a saint soon to be
murdered told you how to live your life,
never found you walking in the ruins of the blown
barracks, wading in the flooded camp, taking cover
in the machinist’s shop, or lighting every votive
in the Cathedral of Saint Just, with its vaulted
choir and transept, a wall of suffering souls.
It was just as Brecht wrote, wasn’t it? “You came
in a time of unrest when hunger reigned.
You came to the people in a time of uprising
and you rose with them. So the time
passed away which on earth was given you.”
Gather in your sleep the ripened plums.
Stay behind in the earth when your name is called.
VISITATION
On the nativity tree, a tiny lute, a French horn and painted egg,
a crèche carved from olive wood, a trumpeting angel. The Cossack
in a red tunic dances between a bird’s nest and some Eiffel Towers.
In the iced window, a cathedral shivers in mist as bits of torn cloud
float toward the spires. There are also boats sailing
in the window, and a city resembling Dresden or Hamburg after the war.
Anna is there, crocheting smoke, not speaking English anymore, as if