possible in every direction out from the stem
center of their circumferences and aside
from the moss-and-mire covered bones
of stripped roots and crippled branches left
piled akimbo to molder among the beetles
in the sinless murk of the forest floor,
except for gorge, gulch, gully, and ravine,
except for the moment waiting in the fist
of the sycamore’s tufted fruit and in the sting
of the loon’s longing before it cries
and in the poise of the desert swallowtail
before it lifts from the dry mountain
wash and in the aim of the alligator’s
undeviating glare before it swirls and sinks
in the generative and ancient slough, except
for the moment waiting in the green walls
of palm spikes, pendants and rosettes, knots
and currents of saw grasses and orchids,
in the tight weave and bloat of prayers
and weapons, in the moment before I move
out into the empty plain of the open sky silent
with sea-light, as if I were a wild and divine
thing myself, to be going I know not where.
PASSAGES
Verses 6–10
6.
Deer passed the day quiet in this unmown
meadow. These grasses pressed to the earth
are the beds where they lay.
7.
My nose to the earth, I followed
the passing of the field mouse weaving
through the wheat grass, leaving seed husks
where she stopped to feed. I sniffed
the rank marking of the weasel’s
passing on a rotting stump, rolled
in the scattered twigs and shell
remnants remaining after the passing-on
of the kingbird’s nestlings, looked up
to the sky-scent and cry of the red-tailed
hawk sailing past overhead.
8.
Remember the only purely good man
to walk this earth? It could simply be
a wish contained in his myth that gardens
of tiny ferns, roseroot, and calamint,
meadow rue, white blossoms of baby’s
breath, sprang up in the hollows
of his footprints, wherever he passed.
9.
A thin scarf of clouds draws itself slowly
over the face of the moon as the moon
passes over the stars and disappears behind
the arches of a stone gate, itself passing
with the earth through midnight and heading
toward the home that is morning.
10.
Like daylight passing through gold
glass beads stretched across a doorway
or the scent of wine grapes passing through
a latticed arbor or a feathering wind
passing through willows beside rippling
water passing through their shadows—
so a spirit, a ghost, a goblin, a god, created
and palpable, passes through every word
written, spoken, sung.
THE STORY HUNT: MISSOURI COUNTRYSIDE, JUNE 2010
It might have been the million stars
on that night coming down silently
from their dark notches in the sky, bringing
with them only the light of fire, no flames,
no heat, no brimstone, and hovering there,
scattered through the swales and woodlands,
filling every space in the twining branches
and foliage of the forest around us.
Or maybe the sassafras, chinkapins,
and willows, the hollys, rushes, and wild
wheat, once every thousand years put forth
at midnight small buds of light lifting
and blinking like their own hearts in time
to the beat of the solstice. And we
were their witnesses.
Or perhaps it was a fleet of tiny invisible
ships, a multitude bearing flickering
lanterns on their masts, vessels launched
by beings searching the night’s deep
current for their missing gods.
Or it might have been the black-winged
beetles of the order coleoptera, those fireflies
gliding slowly, almost floating, through
every space in the forest, above the dank
debris and murk of the earth, into the upper
canopies, igniting their wild bioluminescences,
each one throbbing with passion, drawing us
like spirits into the insect art of their being.
Yet, maybe those pulsing lights—drifting
low over the cow ponds and empty clearings,
pausing in among the forest corridors—
were the chantings of a peculiar prayer.
Had we been able to transcribe that shifting
syntax, decipher the counterpoint, join in with
the canticle, we might suddenly have become
ourselves—the lantern, the budding light,
solstice and wing, time and the once upon.
THE SEEMING OF THINGS
On the surface, it appeared
to be an osprey, a white-bellied raptor
with spiny talons, sentinel in its cottonwood
tower above rumbling water.
But diving suddenly, plunging hard,
it became a rapier splitting
the firmament with a deft slicing,
the sky slit through and falling open
from throat to navel.
Flapping then with wet frantic wings
through the breaking ripples and rapids
toward shore, its heavy silver catch held
tight in its claws, it was a messenger
clutching proof, dragging salvation
twisting and thrashing, out of the deep.
A fish, like time set down on a shore,
looks only two ways—one eye backward
toward life, the other forward toward sky.
I know an alchemist who is a churning
river transforming the heave and plummet
of light into the treadle of fins and gills.
In these moments this afternoon, god
is the sure glint of a flank below water,
and summons well; god is an osprey’s empty
belly and receives with appetite; god
is fish spine and gut and relinquishes all.
This text seems right for a rushing
river full of gullets and bones, for its multiple
voices ring also with lies and devotions
that pitch and fall and swallow one another,
constantly present, suddenly lost,
all inseparable.
COURTING WITH FINESSE, MY DOUBLE ORANGE POPPY
I know I said I loved you,
but I was drunk at the time
on citrus ice and marmalade.
I know I caressed the open places
where your petals join together
at the stem, but you just happened
to lean my way in the breeze,
into my hands already cupped
and blossom-shaped.
Maybe it seemed to you I reflected
the color of your grace in my eyes,
but it was evening, remember, the sun
sinking, and I was looking west.
And perhaps I did sing to you
of unfolding fringed petal
s
delicately crumpled first in the bud,
but it was really the unwinding
orange nub of the early evening
moon that I described with such rapture.
And if I did whisper to you once
of damp stamens, mesmerizing leaves
deeply lobed, spicy oil pockets
of seeds, those were merely facts,
a dull litany I recited in my sleep.
I don’t know how you could think
I came of my own accord to lie
beside you all night in your sway.
I was only your imagination.
Don’t ever believe I wrote these words
for you: In those tangled, moist woods
and thickets where I live, there grows
native and rooted deep in the desire
I myself invent, a divinely aloof,
double orange glory.
ROMANCE
In love with the body, especially when
it dances in love with its own dance as it toes
and taps . . . flickers, creepers, chickadees
around a tree trunk, a click beetle in a flipping
somersault, the soft-shoe swish and sway
of the chee and feather grasses, the lissom uvas;
in love with the melding of the body,
especially when it languishes in the surf
of its own sleep . . . the belly slump of a leopard
stretched high on a branch, camouflaged,
leaf and fur, the tight sleep of a tumblebug egg
in its buried pod of dung, the man in a backyard
hammock slowly rocking with the slowly
rolling sun through evening shadows;
(so floats the sea otter on its back, bobbing
with the rocking sea, so bobs the gelatinous
umbrella and stinging strings of the jellyfish,
jelly and sting being the design and event
of the sea’s own rolling body)
especially when the perfumes of a vigorous
body rocking, sleeping in the sun’s evening
rest are of the salt of the sea, his body itself
being the salt of the earth, in love
with my mouth when the salt is tasted;
no ardor surpasses a body on the hunt,
halting abruptly, one foot lifted above the snow,
poised, as intent as frozen air, eyes as pure
and sharp as ice, then the bolt—the élancé—
beat and soul wholly in pursuit—the sail—
supreme the contact—most foreign, most
familiar, on the far edge of the horizon.
ROCKING AND RESURRECTION
Some people, injured or frightened, rock
all day long holding their knees to their chins,
on sofas and wooden benches, in beds,
on bare floors, rocking as if they believed
they were trained riders on pearl stallions,
or golden-seeded stem-swingers in autumn
fields, or, with their eyes closed, believed
they were flowing purple flags in a sun-
warmed wind, convinced and comforted
by their own rocking.
Mary rocked a grown man dead in her arms,
and Lear swayed with Cordelia-gone held
close to his heart. Did they believe this old
motion performed long enough might
bring breath back? Or did they rock to ease
the loved, lapsing body into the earth?
Or did they rock to give their spines
and breasts a healing expression of grief?
Lullabies, cradles, rocking chairs, hammocks,
long rope swings—a need of the body seems
calmed by this motion of surge and release.
There’s someone I want to take into my arms
tonight and rock, his head on my shoulder,
his lips at my throat. I want to move with him
easily, as moonlight rolls and rises on an open
sea, move with the same slow push and pause
a trout uses to tread snow water, the same delve
and release of a bird’s tongue in a flume
of honeysuckle. Sinking and returning over
and over, I want to go with him backward
into the balm of stars, forward into the bible
of sun, swing through and behind the blind
bone mask together, out and beyond the cold
marble eyes, crossing and crossing back with him
in my arms until the name of any crossing,
the fear of any crossing, ceases to matter,
ceases to be, fall clear to the bottom of a death
with him, then rise together, saved by
that motion, and made whole, and restored.
NEW VOCABULARY
It might be possible to disregard
the silent hiss of an open-mouthed
possum immobile on her silver back
in the forest leaves, and it might be
possible to view with indifference
the kite-like ears of a doe
hesitant at the edge of a sallow
muskeg, or the white, fleeing rumps
of over-the-prairie pronghorn.
Some people might never notice
the mating finch, the crimson
chimmer of his call, and some might
find it easy to dismiss the heaving
ribs of a spiny lizard at pause,
one forefoot raised, easy to pass by
indifferent to the ruffled blur
of a sage grouse rising
from the dusty brush.
And I can allow that not everyone
should be impressed with the unbalanced
and beadled claws of the ghost crab
or the multi-doored mound of a single
banner-tailed rat.
But the eyes met straight-on—
whether coyote yellow or sizzling bird-
bead of black metal, whether the tilted
study of gleaming lizard grain,
or the clear gray marble of seal,
or the dark unflickering candle
of fox—the eyes, nailhead-tenacious,
star-steady, searing as salt, unrelenting,
fierce pinions from far foreign realms,
surely no one can ignore being thus
so found and fixed, so disassembled,
so immediately redefined.
VULNERABLE AND SUSCEPTIBLE
We are vulnerable to blindness caused
by the absence of light: snow-filled fog
along a frozen river at night, smoke stack
smoldering black clouds across the sun,
a burlap sack pulled over the head, fastened
with rope at the neck, eyes open inside
searching the weave for any pinpoint of day.
Death can happen by such blindness
when the lantern begins to flicker and dim
deep in a cave, fades, fails, and one is crawling now,
hands and knees on damp rock. All the cells
of the body—gut, fingertips, ends of the hair—
are straining to see. The nose sniffs for light.
King Harold II was blind to death, killed
by an arrow through his eye.
Once I saw a blind girl come to her door,
who couldn’t see me as I stood on her lawn
watching the gray in the center of her brown
eyes, who, inside her blindness, saw in the stillness
how I held my breath to stay uns
een, both
of us staring, susceptible to the absence of sight.
It can make the mind crazy to think of it:
how the generous light of the sun can penetrate
the eyes like a searing sword so harshly
brilliant that it creates total darkness, blinding,
cutting and killing, at the same time, sight
and the source of its own name.
Some, though having no eyes, are not blind.
The mimosa is not blind to the sun, leaning
upward toward its travel all day and also not blind
to the rain, swelling at its coming. Each blind
leaf partners with the eyeless wind.
Blindness is considered a virtue
in Justice, who has eyes we’ve never seen.
In a moment last spring, I was so vulnerable
to the call of a courting finch high on the roof
that I held in my hand unseen
not the bird but the sound of the bird.
The spiritual are susceptible to what is seen
in blindness. Closing their eyes, they can see
the cleaved stone in the spiral of the dayflower,
the green seed in the voice of night. Sometimes
they see (and therefore believe) the blind
god of the beginning whose closed eyes,
upon opening, created light.
THE BLIND BEGGAR’S DOG
Mangy bitch, emaciated,
old scavenger, pocked hide, warty
muzzle, one hip lower than the other,
she came to him by mistake (sent
by the Mistake Maker) straight
from the African plains
in a crate marked The Unsightly.
Cur-crone, she knows everything
about following lions, those regal
rumps, at a distance. She knows
about cowering, circling and circling,
the dart-in, the rip, and the snatch.
Snarling, ears back, half charging,
she’s put to rout, in her time,
many worrisome vultures
and carrion crows.
By the neat nip of her teeth,
Holy Heathen Rhapsody Page 3
