feeding our ancient ancestors

Though they will never have seen
such before, we leave special teas
in painted ceramic bowls, orange
and cherry jams, breads and linen napkins,
beside the remnants of their scattered bones.

We tie messages around green glass
bottles of wine, flasks of olives, place them
on the surface of the sea, watch them
sink slowly down to those who remain
among the rubble of their flooded shelters.
Were the current not so swift, we might
descend to deliver these gifts ourselves,
urging all to eat, to drink.

We feed their cold emptiness
with fragrances of tropical orchids,
the blossoms of magnolia and plum,
with the perfume of our prayers for solace
placed to waft inward over the ashes
of those entombed in desert caves.

Here are matches, we say to the bodies
frozen in icy passes, huddled inside ragged
animal skins, kerosene and a lamp,
woolen coat, metal shovel, sharpened
ax, a saddle, a horse, silver spurs.

If any should remain wanting,
yearning in their silent state, we offer
for sustenance a deeper vision of the space
where their spirits now rest, recite for them
the latitude, the longitude, the mountain
continent, the forest and prairie expanse
of their dust and decimation circling
on a vibrant globe. Nebulas and galaxies,
suns and stellar time might sooth their disquiet,
lift their souls to their rightful places.

And to all those without names, we give
more than one name: homo habilis, homo
erectus, fossil skeletons of rock, old
plodders, old searchers, first wielders, fierce,
steadfast clingers—and in the here and now
we are determined—the unforsaken.

symbols and signs

I’ve seen this house before, simple,
clapboard, three stone steps up
to the porch, one window on each side
of the door, a hallway leading to the back.
This house appears hazy in the cool,
dim twilight of the autumn forest.
Early evening is the descending silence
of nuthatch and chickadee. Fallen leaves
cover the yard. A rake leans against
the porch post. This is a place of humans.

I’ve seen this house before, set against
the sharp rise of rust-colored rock spears
shadowing it in the canyon at dawn.
There’s a path in the red dust,
through the dry grasses to the porch.
I smell bread here, and coffee, corn
boiling in a pot. The clink of spoon
against bowl is a singularly human sound.

I know this house. It rests on pillars
above the mucky swamp. Its roof
is covered in trumpet vines, orange-red
blossoms with wide red mouths. An anole,
green in the green shadows, jerks forward.
Mosses hang everywhere like tattered
rags of grey fringe in the tangle of cypresses
around the walls of this house. The day
is only tiny pieces of sky here. This is a human
place. Something splashes through the mud
below the porch. The dog lifts his head.
Three herons rise from their roosts.

Humans live here. Light showing
through the windows from the inside
onto the blowing snow of the plains
is human-made, human-maintained—
candle, hearth, lamp, stove. This light,
an aberration in the frozen expanse
of a black night, comes from tended
fire. Humans tend to fire.

I know this house. I hear voices inside,
syllables and variances of words, one voice,
another, unhurried, the brief murmur
of a measure of song. I’m walking up the steps.
Someone is coming to the door.

the character of the bowl

A bowl has the shape of two hands
cupped together, a shape reminiscent
of a dead turtle’s shell or a hollow gourd,
a winter leaf curled and holding snow,
a human skull where the brain once lay.

This blue bowl, a fat half-belly
sitting on the table, keeps in itself,
like genes in a cell, its histories of curled
leaf and delved bone, braided reeds,
molded clay. I move my finger
along its rim in imitation of revolution,
feel the hard, clear-cut curve of its edge.
This motion of orbit in my finger
is a familiar travel, the same followed
by the moon, by a seed caught
in a whirlpool, the same circle
patterned by rain in rings on ponds,
by summer growth in the trunks
of trees. A halo is simply sunlight
shining on the rim of a bowl set free.

The character of the bowl plays
many parts—monk’s bowl, beggar’s
bowl, sugar bowl, fish bowl, dog’s bowl,
the role of hat and a guide for barbers,
Miss Havisham’s punch bowl chipped
and cracked. Kings of the past often
called for their royal bowls.

A bowl, held by both hands
up to the lips, masquerades as a cup
with milk, with tea or wine.
Whether made of brass, crystal,
hand-painted porcelain, tin, or wood—
when offered, a bowl filled with sliced
peaches, cinnamon and cream is gladly
accepted by almost everyone.

In a shell game run by a shyster,
bowls upside down can hide a coin
or nothing. Here I am, here under
the great glass bowl of the sky.

alpha and omega

Three blackbirds tear at carrion
in a ditch, and all the light
of the stars is there too, present
in their calls, embodied in their ebony
beaks, taken into the cold wells
of their eyes, steady on the torn
strings of rotten meat in the weeds.

Starlight pierces the sea
currents and crests, touching scuds
and krill and noble sand amphipods.
It moves so steadily it is stationary
through the swill of seaweed, the fleshy
shells of purple jellyfish.

And all the light from star masses,
from constellations and clusters,
surrounds the old man walking
with his stick at night tapping the damp.
The light from those sources
exists in his beginning, interwoven
with his earliest recollections—
phrase of cradle and breath, event
of balance and reach.

Light from the stars is always
here, even with the daytime sun,
among cattle on coastal plains
and the egrets riding on their backs,
shining on the sky-side of clouds
and straight through the fog of clouds,
between white fox and white hare,
between each crystal latch to crystal
in snow. It illuminates turreted
spires and onion domes of foreign
cities, enters the stone mouths
and grimaces of saints and gargoyles,
touches the mossy roofs of weathered
barns, insect-tunneled eaves and the barbs
of owls, and all sides of each trunk
and shadow-blossom of bee trees
and willow banks, filling orchards
and aisles of almonds and plums.

The starlight comes, in union
and multiple, as weightless
as the anticipation of the barest
rain, as the slightest suggestion
of a familiar voice sounding
in the distance. It is as common,
as fulsome as the air of a mellow
time with no wind. The light
of the stars encompasses everything,
even until and beyond the final cold
passing of the last cinder-bone
and minim of the vanished earth.

the history of starlight at night

makes more silver the silver
buckle on the rapist’s belt, makes
more august the silver nailheads
in the doorpost, subsumes

all rain-held silver as it falls.
This history enables long blades

of blowing grasses to cut cleanly
and precisely through the darkness like old
definitions of sun forged and honed.

It elaborates on the belly and teeth

of the shortfin mako sweeping
into its mouth the brilliance
of the herring’s gleaming body,

further elucidates the white ribbons
of the rabbit’s blood spilled among
mountain boulders where the bobcat
feeds. It distinguishes the yellow

eyes of the jackal, the slitted eyes
of the hyena, the closed eyes

of the stone wall, the lidless,
the frozen eyes of opals and winter
ponds. The long history of starlight

at night possesses, like any song,
like any death, dependable borders
across which one might pass
to disappear, pass to emerge,
secures, like a locked room, a radius
where sworn declarations in light
hover in circles like men conspiring,

encompasses, like a cave, an emptiness
where the blind, the albino, the luminous

spiral and the luminous wheel

and the bald heads of destroying
angels signal and burn, keeps,
like a cold lantern inside its closed

glass space, the real possibility
of error, the actual right to awaken.

pilgrims, missionaries, and seers visit heterocephalus glaber

All of us urged them to rise up
out of the earth and go on a moonless
midnight, to go by all means. We told
them it was essential for their lacking
souls. We said you’ll encounter
in that wide open sky a black blacker
than the one blindness you know, a black
so deep it throbs like the root passion
in your own gut, trembles like desert
rock beneath the hooves of frightened
horses, rings throughout with the brilliant
quantum edges of distance.

We said you’ll witness there the churning
hive of your origins, the holy implements
of transfiguration, and the tomes
of ancient kin, the maps of emboldened
navigators who, like you, moved
in journeys through darkness.

We instructed. We preached.
We explained and cajoled. But how
could they go so far into such manifold
and incantatory spheres? those little
naked mole rats in their tunnel networks
below the earth? How could they emerge
to travel so, with only stumpy limbs
for legs, with their dirt-covered digging
fangs protruding awkwardly like tusks,
with neither coats nor capes to guard
their wrinkled bare bodies from
the chill night air? And how could
they see to go with nothing but shallow
skin-covered sockets for eyes, with no
lantern to fill with fire, with no word
for a boundless heavenly hallow, with no
word for beyond-the-mole-rat-self,
with no known void to fill with vision?

With no sign or query or hunger
for the heart-sensed starlights
of the forever missing from their faithful
old souls, how could they rise
into what they could never imagine?

We turned away from them then
and departed, afraid.

the lost creation of the earth

As they talked and mingled together,
the earth, the size of an orange, floated
among them through the room, slowly
turning on its axis with a not unpleasant
hum, vibrating low like the strum
of bass strings. It seemed wrapped
in silk by its clouds.

And it traveled in its orbit across
the open plains, over cornfields, keeping
pace with the train, along rushes
and scrub willows lining the creek beds.
Cattle in the fields never raised
their heads. Following the empty
tracks at night, it was a pure white
pebble speeding through the black
against the dimmer stars.

No one on board the ship
in the thundering storm noticed
the earth dawning out of the horizon,
shining like a nugget of diamond
with sea rain and salt. And in the spotlight
at the Cirque du Soleil, it was merely
one of nine balls circling the juggler’s
head. Drums rolled. Cymbals rang.
Nothing faltered, not globes, not performer.
How its polar ice caps gleamed blue!
The audience applauded politely.

If it had been observed as itself,
it might have been seen fitting perfectly
in the hand of Christ, on the Buddha’s
lap, cradled like a pearl in a shell,
cherished like a spark of mouse
in the night of a coyote’s eye, rich
and wild with reverence.

The size of a crow’s head, it was
that distinct against the snow as it flew
on its path, that bright through the fog,
that accurate in its courses, that brilliant
in its spheres.

truth and falsehood

Last night in parted clouds,
we couldn’t distinguish the stars falling

from the snow falling—both cold, deadly,
and inviting, both distant
and magnetic in their indefinite

places, both erudite in silence,
both traveling by sleep, both against black,

both against white, against the trickery
of the eye, against revelation,
against immortality,

both boneless, as naked as light, neither

beckoning, neither denying, both ancients
broken and unchronicled,

both out of the pit
into the instant and back, both cracking
the continuum,

rushing down
in multitudes toward the earth
as if it were the Holy Grail, the grave,

both in diamonds, both in spades, all aces—
the way things were for awhile last night.

a meeting of the ways

A monk at night, hooded and robed
in black, disappears into the side door
of a monastery.

Or is it a shadow of wind vanishing
into a cave in a hillside that seems
in the dark to be a monastery built
like a hillside with bell towers and spires?

A starry hill is robed like a monastery
in chants and processions, hooded by night
like a bell tower at prayer. The wind moves
with a penance across the night sky
ringing like a monastery vanishing
into the cave of its own ceremonies.

A monk emerges backward from penance
into the world as if out of the crease
of the night’s horizon black as the mouth
of a cave or a bell and its shadow.
There is definitely motion
and the transformation of confusion.

Carrying rake and shovel, a monk
disappears at vespers through a simple
wooden door in the wall of a monastery
and enters the evening star.

The wind rises now, blows back
my hood, opens my robe like a doorway
to night. The hillside of stars is entering
with its monastery of shadows.
I am the heaven of auguries.

the passing of the wise men

They collected them one by one
like seed-size pearls and put them
in their black velvet bags, gathered
them like small marbles of amethyst
and alabaster, plucked them
like white cherries from a tree.

They placed all of them carefully
in their velvet bags scarcely filled.
And they were patient, gathering
them slowly all their lives, some
like berries of glass, like the slighter
fruit of mistletoe, some appearing
like tiny flames flashing on sunless
river bottoms or shining like quick silver
schools of fish in the deep. A few
were as cold and black and enigmatic
as skull sockets where eyes should be.

When the end came, they crawled
into their black velvet sacks themselves,
pulled the drawstrings tight over
their heads, looked around and above
in the speckled dark and more than once
toward the east, then assembled
their instruments and resumed the study
of their everlasting treasures—Sirius,
Polaris, Arcturus, Capella, Vega,
Andromeda, Cygnus X, guides,
messengers, hope.