The Village on Horseback: Prose and Verse, 2003-2008
Page 18
and confront it in my sleep. But in the day it can’t hold me.
I am desperate but of a sudden the windows are thrown open
and joy admits itself, like daring, all at once
pressing against me with uncertain gifts.
All these promises—
come with me to the field
come at this hour and then
I want to believe and I do, but all my strength rises from the ground
and when I am best — when I rise in the wind, I am so helpless that I call to my love
like leaves in fear of rain.
14
The skin feat, beyond defying—
It begins as a loosening, a rise of the shoulders
the muscles prepare themselves but cannot be ready,
for the nerves go beyond them — out into the air
and the skin feat resolves as the eyes shut and open
and breath reaches to the horizon, the mouth
drawing in
something of ALL the air in the world
and feeling it there, in those small bottles of the lungs.
15
Red thread, blue thread, black thread, white thread.
I am involved in the thought of sewing, but I do not often sew.
Needles never glance — they are already through, already past
what is about to happen. But we,
obtaining for ourselves some lasting thing — we
are present where pretending has no joy.
What’s childish is done without thought of the future.
Children’s hands — can we call them needles?
Come with me, then, and turn your hands in a lathe,
lay them desperately against a whirring stone.
Out beyond the window there are crowds waiting
and waiting in narrow avenues of stone.
Cleverness is no salve. It wants too much.
It expects that it has won, or will.
You may learn to play an instrument, and carry it with you
and have it be a muscle, and always present.
That’s what’s best about people—
loving the world enough to confuse it for oneself.
But what is a statue? Can a farm be a statue?
Can a city? How long does a thing pause before it’s static?
A camera with an open shutter in a high ceilinged room.
We pass by a hundred times invisibly.
I am invisible, you may say, in that photograph,
just as you say,
my wife is standing over there, behind that wall.
There is a door, and a screen, and then she.
Can you imagine what she’s thinking?
16
The speed of trees must fascinate.
An oak tree on a slope releases acorns
and suddenly surrounds itself with oak trees. Oak trees are running
down to the water, they are running all along with the drive.
They ring a place. They drive from that spot in rings.
An old oak was there. It fell one day, in the midst of its dreaming.
You who write on trees, who carve into them,
be careful—
we must take care—
for, hold up your hand before your face — you cannot even see it,
so dark it has suddenly become.
17
A woman is torn in two by the skin feat. She takes her life.
She was on the edge of it. She felt it there,
but it was rotting. It had a stench.
I wanted to cry to her of the sea,
of wood that is called ash, of gas jets on a stove.
But pregnancy has no shape — that is its secret.
It isn’t round at all — it goes beyond itself.
The sun is wrapped in a blanket — yet you feel it from a hundred feet.
Suicide is a carrying also — a pregnancy also.
One carries a cold word, a thought without shape
until it is possible.
One works as an expression of the limbs. Food is gotten, so too a roof.
But there is no use to dancing
if you are yourself—
isn’t movement a mask? isn’t it a costume?
Are you so poor that you walk in only one way,
that you speak and act from one role?
Learn whole lexicons to people your theatre,
and surely know your audience
is no audience at all — just clatter
from a remembered hallway.
18
A bridge is being built. You may find the approach
a short walk from the place you’re standing in.
There are you know, places where when you go there
no one can be admitted.
There are gardens like this — whole sections
of city parks, low places in forests.
What is it holds in a place like that, what matches
us so well that we, appearing there,
feel gone beyond ourselves, and knowing,
the sight of an empty landscape isn’t human?
For we aren’t human — not when we’re alone.
19
The skin feat reports like a drum. Did I say it was breath?
It isn’t breath at all — it’s blood, the beating of blood.
We hear a drumming in the hills. We are out walking
and the drumming comes to us, and I do not look at you.
I am far too afraid.
20
But grief — are we not giving grief its place?
The skin feat is a wardrobe of costumes, and grief is the softest one,
as soft as a cooking knife.
We must love the dead, and learn to sense their finger- tips that trail
and never leave us.
And so, turning from them, we do not leave them. Grief is,
like age, a visible grain that runs the world’s length,
but cannot be followed.
Violet glass of late afternoon when evening will be riotous.
21
Masts fare so well on ships — and how proud we are of them.
Nothing has ever been admired
as sails are, as masts.
The skin feat unfolds your folded limbs, your legs, hands,
arms, chest.
Raise yourself in all weakness, not despite it, but in it.
We receive because of circumstance — not gifts, that’s why
boasting is foolish. That’s why
passing strangers in the early morning
you are not afraid
to look at their eyes
yes, there, where the light pours out.
22
But can you be covetous
of some costume you have made?
The skin feat does not set itself against things.
We don’t frown on possession.
Who doesn’t love, like a rat,
to fill the house with objects, to reflect our selves
in everything we feel kindred to
and gather that to us?
Only — let there be cycles.
Go one day from your fastness
out with a small sack. Five things you like
and you won’t come back.
23
Am I afraid to be the way I speak?
One’s hopes must always be larger than oneself. One
must always
reach with thoughts where hands can’t go.
The work of a life is to find something indomitable.
I love the color gray, and see,
how fine it would have been
to guess at fire, and to have been right.
The one who did that
had no thought for the future.
24
Be easy, be easy. Feel my paper hand
warm upon your own.
Do I love you? You are reading this book,
&nbs
p; a book of my heart, and there are things clouding the air.
I expect that you will be hurt today. That you will be hurt
today, and the next day, the next and the next.
The ones who go through their hurt, they don’t impress
me.
Neither the ones who collapse beneath it.
Show me the ones who embrace it — who tie it tight
like a cravat, but unremarkable.
They cannot say afterwards even what prompted
that day, the necktie.
I am bound, they say, for a funeral, my own,
in a place not of my choosing
where cornflowers have been threaded
into a rope that anyone may carry.
25
We see animals and want what’s theirs,
but are afraid to give up even one thing our own.
Don’t you see? You’re already carrying
as much as can be held. You have always done so.
Becoming does not mean hazarding what you were—
it means letting it fall away.
Each time you cross the room, you will step
delicately over
the skin of your old life.
26
I tie ribbons in my beard, on my wrists, my ankles.
Is it violence you fear? I have fought others and laid them
down
and I have been hurt myself in the same way.
The body is so strong! It is covered in bark. It is poisonous to touch!
I have also been a coward and stood by
and afterwards helped a friend pick up his teeth.
Do you see my tooth? he said.
I said, a bit of it is there. And there’s another piece. He said,
the teeth break when they hit against the other teeth.
The sound of the skin feat is teeth breaking.
Do you feel the preciousness of your teeth?
27
Learning to be alone, well — that’s the bell tower.
A child may have it — and then it goes away. You feel their small hands.
They consume the very air.
But no one blames them. They are children, we say—
as if measuring the distance a body will fall.
28
Stones don’t carry their own weight.
That’s why they’re heavy.
They are like impressions of another’s sadness—
coming with nothing, you leave with nothing,
but we who despair are borne aloft.
Have you taken two knives and tried to cut one in half with the other?
I am like that when I’m hurt. I can’t even
hold the knife-handles — I don’t even recognize them.
I hold the blades and cut with sharpness into sharpness
and into my own hands.
29
We are so fond of our shadows.
There it is, we say when we see it.
There it is, my shadow.
Seeing your shadow is like having a conversation
when someone remembers something you once said.
It’s like getting a letter, like waking on a boat.
We shouldn’t really have shadows. Nothing
explains them, not really—
not why they’re our own.
30
Will you sit with me, braiding?
I learn that tarpaulin is made from scars
and that oil cloth is carded sealskin.
I am always learning and I don’t care very much what’s true.
The skin feat — yes, — fares well without truth.
Unbuttoned like a coat, it fits as well with your best gallantry.
It is out in the sea with the long swimmers,
not when they’re brave, but when they’re weak,
when they’re crying, with water in their mouths,
out of sight of land, despairing, wishing themselves
seals.
But not the safety of a seal, no, the terror of it—
the wholeness of the world like a gray marble.
The sea is rising and yet we swim still deeper.
31
Our houses really are on stilts.
They really run on long legs of chickens.
We smell men hiding in buttons and would devour them—
or are you afraid to eat a human?
Are you so simple? There are crimes,
but that’s not one. To eat a human?
Birds hunt all along the cliffs.
Our mythologies are numberless.
Did someone tell you all the tales were told?
I know another yet unsaid.
Shall I say it — already
another gathers in its place.
Myths are not a swelling of our lives—
they are not gold and lead.
They are sense—
the width of a board that you run along
from roof to roof
the street so far below.
32
Scarves pretend that they are nooses.
For them also the skin feat.
For them a white tinged joy of honeysuckle pressed to the mouth.
How long they wait, through a dozen summers,
through the growth of limbs, through boxes,
wardrobes, cupboards, shelves.
Finally, about the neck.
One can’t imagine what that’s like,
to be tied fast about a neck and gently there
to learn one’s nature.
Were you once the hair on a sheep?
Can you remember so far?
You must behave as if you know what the others know.
But who are they? Did you even see them enter?
33
The skin feat is not a matter of consensus.
About this, no one will agree.
It is in spite of everyone. It is a weak arm that can’t be bent.
Your mother sews you into a blanket.
Your father adjusts his hat.
The town gathers to see you off.
34
While awaiting the skin feat,
the audience convenes in rows and aisles.
But the theatre has been set fire!
It is burning to the ground.
Everyone races out. Six or seven are killed,
and one a child. But were they real?
Can you judge that? I am so slow in judging
who is real.
Perhaps they were just wriggling fish — or puppets.
Never again! the authorities say,