Time like a one-eyed jack
whose other face I can’t see
Hustling me on O hustling me on,
Dark of the moon, far side of the sun, the back half of the sky.
Time is memory, he adds:
It’s all in the mind’s eye,
where everything comes to one,
Conjecture, pure spirit, the evil that matter cannot present us—
As the sentence hides in the ink,
as cancer hides in the smoke,
As dark hides in the light,
Time hides in our pockets, not stirring, not weighing much.
—5 September 1985
—Still, they tried it again, one last time,
In 1776, the Battle of Island Flats
Outside Fort Patrick Henry
on the Long Island of the Holston,
Dragging Canoe and Abraham
advancing quicker than frost
With their sworn braves through the countryside.
After a small skirmish between scouts and advance guards,
Dragging Canoe brought three hundred men
Into position along a quarter of a mile
Fortified line of calm frontiersmen
and ended for all time
The Cherokee’s mystic Nation
with streams of blood every way.
Never so much execution in so short a time
On the frontier.
Our spies really deserve the greatest applause.
We took a great deal of plunder and many guns.
We have a great reason to believe
They are pouring in greatest numbers upon us
and beg assistance of our friends.
Exaggeration and rhetoric:
Nothing was pouring on them, of course,
but history and its disaffection,
Stripping the vacuum of the Cherokee:
The Battle of Island Flats
Starts the inevitable exodus,
Tsali and the Trail of Tears …
—15 september 1985
—Attention is the natural prayer of the soul …
September, the bed we lie in between summer and autumn,
Sunday in all the windows,
the slow snow of daylight
Flaking the holly tree and the hedge panes
As it disappears in the odd milk teeth
The grass has bared, both lips back
in the cool suck of dusk.
Prayer wheels, ugly as ice, turn in our eyes:
verbs white, nouns white,
Adjectives white on white,
they turn in our eyes:
Nothing is lost in my eyes in your eyes
nothing is lost
As the wheels whiffle and spin,
conjunction and adverb
White in the white sky of our eyes,
ribbons luffing goodbye …
September butterflies, heavy with pollen, leaf down
In ones and pairs from the oak trees
through the dwarf orchard
And climb the gold-dusted staves of sunlight toward the south
Like notes from a lush music
we always almost hear
But don’t quite, and stutter into the understory next door.
Night now. Silence. The flowers redeem
Nothing the season can offer up,
stars beginning to chink fast
Overhead, west wind
Shuffling the decks of the orchard leaves.
Silence again,
a fine ash, a night inside the night.
—29 September 1985
—The shadows of leaves on the driveway and just-cut grass,
Blurred and enlarged,
riffle in short takes
As though stirred under water, a snicked breeze
Moving their makers cross-current and cross-grained across the pool
The daylight makes in the ash tree
and the troubled oak.
These monochromatic early days of October
Throb like a headache just back of the eyes,
a music
Of dull, identical syllables
Almost all vowels,
ooohing and aaahing
As though they would break out in speech and tell us something.
But nothing’s to be revealed,
It seems:
each day the shadows blur and enlarge, the rain comes
and comes back,
A dripping of consonants,
As though it too wanted to tell us something, something
Unlike the shadows and their stray signs,
Unlike the syllable the days make
Behind the eyes, cross-current and cross-grained, and unlike
The sibilance of oak tree and ash.
What it wants to tell us
Is ecstasy and always,
Guttural words that hang like bats in the throat,
their wings closed, their eyes shut:
What it wants to tell us is damped down, slick with desire,
And unaccountable
to weather and its apostrophes,
Dark, sweet dark, and close to hand:
Inside its body, high on a branch, a bird
repeats the letters of its secret name
To everything, and everything listens hard.
—4 October 1985
—Truth is the absence of falsehood,
beauty the absence of ugliness,
Jay like a stuffed toy in the pear tree,
Afternoon light-slant deep weight
diluting to aftermath on the lawn,
Jay immobile and fluffed up,
Cloud like a bass note, held and slow, now on the sunlight.
The disillusioned and twice-lapsed, the fallen-away,
Become my constituency:
those who would die back
To splendor and rise again
From hurt and unwillingness,
their own ash on their tongues,
Are those I would be among,
The called, the bruised by God, by their old ways forsaken
And startled on, the shorn and weakened.
There is no loneliness where the body is.
There is no Pyrrhic degeneration of the soul there,
Dragon maple like sunset,
scales fired in the noon’s glare
Flaking and twisting when the wind spurts,
Sky-back a Cherokee blue,
scales winking and flashing.
The poem is written on glass
I look through to calibrate
the azimuth of sun and Blue Ridge,
Angle of rise and fall the season reconstitutes.
My name is written on glass,
The emptiness that form takes, the form of emptiness
The body can never signify,
yellow of ash leaves on the grass,
Three birds on the dead oak limb.
The heart is a spondee.
—12 October 1985
—It is as though, sitting out here in the dwarf orchard,
The soul had come to rest at the edge of the body,
A vacancy, a small ache,
the soul had come to rest
After a long passage over the wasteland and damp season.
It is as though a tree had been taken out of the landscape.
It is as though a tree had been taken out
and moved to one side
And the wind blew where the tree had been
As though it had never blown there before,
or that hard.
Tomorrow the rain will come with its lucid elastic threads
Binding the earth and sky.
Tomorrow the rain will come
And the soul will start to move again,
Retracing its passage, marking itself
back to the center of things.
But today, in the blanched warmth of Indian summer,
It nudges the edge of the bo
dy,
The chill luminance of its absence
pulsing and deep,
Extraction the landscape illuminates in the body’s night.
—22 October 1985
—The season steps up,
repeating its catechism inside the leaves.
The dogwoods spell out their beads,
Wind zithers a Kyrie eleison over the power lines:
Sunday, humped up in majesty,
the new trench for the gas main
Thrums like a healing scar
Across the street, rock-and-roll
Wah-wahs from off the roof next door to Sylvia’s house
just down the block:
The days peel back, maples kick in their afterburners,
We harry our sins
and expiations around the purgatorial strip
We’re subject to, eyes sewn shut,
Rocks on our backs,
escaping smoke or rising out of the flame,
Hoping the angel’s sword
unsullied our ashed foreheads,
Hoping the way up is not the way down,
Autumn firestorm in the trees,
autumn under our feet …
—29 October 1985
—I have no interest in anything
but the color of leaves,
Yellow leaves drawing the light around them
Against the mumped clouds of an early November dusk—
They draw the light like gold foil
around their stiff bodies
And hang like Byzantium in the Byzantine sky.
I have no interest in anything
but the color of blood,
Blood black as a prayer book, flushed from my own body,
China black, lapping the porcelain:
somewhere inside me blood
Is drawing the darkness in,
Stipple by stipple into the darker waters beneath the self.
I have no interest in anything
but the color of breath,
Green as the meat-haunted hum of flies,
Viridian exocrine,
wisp of the wave-urge, jade
Calvary of the begotten sigh,
Alpha of everything, green needle and green syringe.
—11 November 1985
—“If you licked my heart, you’d die,
poisoned by gall and anxiousness.”
I read that last night in my first dream.
In the next, the leaves fell from the trees,
the stars fell from the sky
Like snowflakes, slowly and vast:
As I walked through the lightfall, my footprints like small, even
voids
Behind me,
the color of starflakes settling on everything,
Light up to my ankles, then up to my knees,
I moved effortlessly through the splendor drifting around me
Until I became a dot,
then grained out into light,
The voids of my footprints still sunk, hard-edged and firm, where
I’d passed.
In my last dream, just before sunrise,
I showed slides, two slides at a time,
of the Resurrection, one
A painting, the other a photograph.
Much later, I showed the Five Sorrows of the Virgin,
One at a time,
three prayers of intercession and the Assumption of St. John …
The subject matter is not the persona, it’s the person:
“If you licked my heart, you’d die,
poisoned by gall and anxiousness.”
Today, in mid-November’s ocher afternoon light,
All’s otherworldly,
my neighbor rolling his garbage carts to the curb,
My son repacking the tulip bulbs in their black beds:
What stays important is what we don’t know and what we are not,
For nothing and nothing make nothing.
—20 November 1985
—All my life I’ve stood in desire:
look upon me and leave me alone,
Clear my windows and doors of flies
And let them be, taking no heed of them: I abide
In darkness,
it is so small and indivisible,
A full food, and more precious than time:
Better to choose for your love what you can’t think,
better
To love what may be gotten and held,
And step above what can be cast out and covered up:
The shorter the word, the more it serves the work of the spirit:
Tread it down fast,
have it all whole, not broken and not undone.
—28 November 1985
—Last day of November, rain
Stringy and almost solid,
incessantly gathering darkness around it
At one in the afternoon across
the Long Island of the Holston:
Up-island, steam from the coal gasification plant
Of Tennessee Eastman Corporation melds
With the cloud cover and rain cover
halfway up Bays Mountain—
Sycamore trees, with their mace-like and tiny pendants
And chimes, bow out toward the south sluice of the South Fork
Where I stand, a twentieth century man on ground
Holy for over ten thousand years:
Across the river, the burial sites
have been bulldozed and slash-stacked
Next to Smith Equipment Company;
Behind me, the chain-linked and barbed-wire fence
Cuts under the power pylon
from one side of the island to the other,
Enclosing the soccer fields;
Rain is continuous as I turn
From the gray, cataracted eye
of a television set
Caught in a junk-jam of timber and plastic against the bank,
And walk back to the footbridge
I’d crossed the river on an hour and a half before:
Next to it, off to the left,
A rectangular block of marble, backed by slab-stone,
Had been inscribed:
Long Island of the Holston
Sacred Cherokee Ground Relinquished by Treaty
Jan. 7, 1806.
3.61 Acres Returned
To the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians by
The City of Kingsport on July 16, 1976:
Wolf Clan, Blue Clan, Deer Clan, Paint Clan, Wild Potato Clan,
Long Hair Clan, Bird Clan:
Steam stacks, sycamores, brush harbor,
rain like the river falling …
—5 December 1985
—Late afternoon, blue of the sky blue
As a dove’s neck, dove
Color of winter branches among winter branches,
Guttural whistle and up,
December violets crooked at my feet,
Cloud-wedge starting to slide like a detached retina
Slanting across the blue
inaction the dove disappears in.
Mean constellations quip and annoy
next night against the same sky
As I seek out, unsuccessfully,
In Luke’s spyglass Halley’s comet and its train of ice:
An ordered and measured affection is virtuous
In its clean cause
however it comes close in this life.
Nothing else moves toward us out of the stars,
nothing else shines.
—12 December 1985
—I am poured out like water.
Who wouldn’t ask for that lightning strike,
the dog’s breath on your knee
Seductive and unrehearsed,
The heart resoftened and made apt for illumination,
The body then taken up and its ghostly eyes dried?
Who wouldn’t ask for that light,
that liquefaction and entry?
The pentimento ridge line and bulk
Of the Blue Ridge emerge
behind the vanished over-paint
Of the fall leaves across the street,
Cross-hatched and hard-edged, deep blue on blue.
What is a life of contemplation worth in this world?
How far can you go if you concentrate,
how far down?
The afternoon shuts its doors.
The heart tightens its valves,
the dragon maple sunk in its bones,
The grass asleep in its wheel.
The year squeezes to this point, the cold
Hung like a lantern against the dark
burn of a syllable:
I roll it around on my tongue, I warm its edges …
—25 December 1985
Light Journal
To speak the prime word and vanish
into the aneurysm
Unhealed and holding the walls open,
Trip and thump of light
up from the fingernails and through
The slack locks and stripped vessels
At last to the inarticulation of desire …
What did I think I meant then, Greece, 1959:
Beauty is in the looking for it,
The light here filtered through silk,
The water moving like breathing,
Moving in turn to the tide’s turn,
black thread through the water weave.
Whatever it was, I still mean it.
Everyone stands by himself
on the heart of the earth,
Pierced through by a ray of sunlight:
And suddenly it’s evening.
It’s odd what persists
slip-grained in the memory,
Candescent and held fast,
Odd how for twenty-six years the someone I was once has stayed
Stopped in the columns of light
Zone Journals Page 6
