the soul of subtlety

It takes practice to be able to see the formless
suggestion of what is never seen, as, just
beyond the farthest prairie horizon that the eyes
can define, the fragment of a nonexistent
motion might be missing its blind
spirit on horseback unnoticed.

So faint, so slight to the vision,
much less detectable than the moon
on a cloudy, moonless night—maybe
there is no nonessence faltering around
the shape of the sweet yellow flag,
as I once believed, a quivering lack
so false it can’t bear the weight of a name.

Standing beside the churling whitecaps
at the canyon rim of a descending sea,
someone denies proposing the state
of a dead white woman rising with the surf
to sing in silence of her own absence.
And in the skyward dissolution of fog
disappearing in shades above the field
of mountain snow, there is nothing
implying its non-presence or possibility,
no purpose of ice refusing to remark on itself.

Can it be real, a fact so illusory
among the parsnip and minty skullcap
of the wetlands that it has not as yet
even hinted at its own unreality?

How shall I speak in truth of the momentary,
starry realm spreading forever as a lie
unwitnessed inside the black call
of the crow at dusk?

This blatancy is too subtle: the freedom
to say my unbound voice struggling
against its bars and chains.

in another place

Outside the realm of breath and bone,
of vision with eyes, outside a sentient
vein of any kind, outside the tangible
or any of those ways we ordinarily tell
ourselves of presence, there may be a place
where one could be fire, for instance,
not a body lit by the light of fire,
not a body hearing the humming furnace
of fire or watching the orange, ash
rimmed coals of fire fading, but a place
where one might be the fire itself,
if be is the right word for such a state,
if state has definition in such a realm.

Perhaps in this place one might,
if one wished, be merely motion—not
the wind or plains of grasses swathed
by wind, not a canyon wren in flight
passing a cliff edge, gliding straight out
over the echoing blue gorge below, not
the rise and hush of a river at the height
of spring, be none of these but the motion
alone of each, without weight or force,
without shadow, without domain.

One might exist (or some similar
word for being) not as soil or rock
or sea cave, not as any blossom
or animal blustering of the earth
but as its orbit, and not the path itself
but the equation the earth creates against
the starry background of its passages,
exist as the sublime math of the earth
in its revolution, not numbers
or symbols on paper, but the soaring
right of the math, that entity, if entity
is correct in these circumstances,
if circumstance exists in this place,
if place be a concept of equation.

Three horses stand together in the chill
autumn dusk. The lowered heads
of the bay and her sister are touching,
the silver fog of their breaths meeting.
The third, a pinto, stands perpendicular
to the others, faces the haunch of the bay.
Maybe in this place I could be the design
these horses make in relation to one another
against the sky, be the sort of beautiful
purity a design like that can make,
if that is what I am, if I am is anyone.
It could be fun in a place like that.
Or something even better.

the questing

Knock, and it shall be opened . . . MATTHEW 7:7

Sometimes it’s like a ticking,
like the ticking metal makes as it cools,
or the random clicking the rafters make
as the house shifts in the wind.

The same insistence is always present,
whether its sound is sharp like a ring rapping
against glass or like one loose shingle
flapping directly overhead.

It can clatter rapidly, like teeth
clicking from cold, like bones tossed
for a prophecy, like stones rolled
by a current, rattling together unseen
over the river bottom. It pauses,
as if to reconsider, then resumes,
like the tapping of an old man’s foot
as he rocks through a summer dusk,
sporadic as the hammering of a woodpecker
in a hardwood forest, first far, then near.

It is reverberant in the tocking sounds
of hail striking rocky ground, the same
sound heard in the ritual languages
of high desert peoples.

It maintains a constancy like the clacking
wheels of a train on the tracks passing
through the countryside or like the rhythmic
catching of wheels in a clock passing
through time as if it were a landscape.

Something abroad is knocking.
Something pervasive, resolved, unknown,
seeks entrance. Imagine unlatching
the gate. Envision what may pass
through among us. Pretend to answer.

seeing what is seen

There are faces everywhere outside
the fence. I see them deep in the grasses,
staring, grimacing, multi-eyed, bald,
some earless, some with thin and crooked
snouts, some with open mouths, some
with no mouths at all, an audience,
a crowd in the field outside the fence.

All are agile, adaptable among
the tall grasses. If a shadow should pass
over them or if the sweet red fennel
should bend slightly in a wind and brush
against them, they vanish instantly
into the cruder structures of their features,
the stalk-and-stem outline of their basic state,
the original leaf-and-seed version of themselves.

Some faces blink, look away, look back.
What is it they see? Some sink and sleep
and never wake. What vision is their
nightmare? There is a face clear and stark
in the flat rock of the cliff above the creek.
Viewed from upside down, however,
it disappears, retreating into the blank
and enduring stone soul of itself. We might
envy the essence of such a transformation.

There are winter faces in snow patches
and open black earth on the northern
hillsides, and narrow faces lengthening
across the field as evening advances, night
faces fidgeting at the shadow edges
of the streetlight. There’s a face in the wooden
box in the corner of the church, a face
in the stirred water of the baptismal font,
a forlorn and wistful face in the dripped
wax pooled at the candle’s base. It fattens,
it closes its eyes, it grows cold.

We see by being seen. We are never
alone where we are. There are faces
even the blind can’t see.

a mystic in the garden mistakes lizards for ghosts and extrapolates on same

One slight shiver and flutter of blue
morning glory, a leaf tip resonating
with no wind, a switch, a quick scritch
(was it?) in the dry thatches beneath the ivy,
a shadow left shaking—ghosts are
everywhere in this garden, each a cause
sensed but never seen among the heavy
vines of wisteria, the blossoms of purple
aster and white phlox along the paths.

They are a brief turn sensed just once,
like the supposed click of a key heard
in a foreign realm and never heard again,
like the last strum of strings remembered
after the player has gone. They are a slit
of night in daytime, fitting exactly the mossy
cracks in the stone wall, disappearing
down those tunnels to whatever hell
or heaven exists for them there.

What is sensed of these ghosts
is only the moment witnessed just after
their vanishing. Where they were
is all that they are.

They may have eyes the color
of mirrors that stare with the steadiness
of glass. They may have porous bodies
like ponds in rain, like the diaphanous
wings of dragonflies in sun. They may have
tails indistinguishable from the skeletal
blades of dead grasses, move on feet
as quiet and precise as cobwebs.
Surely within the insubstantial
bone marrow of these ghosts live
all the ghosts of themselves existing
in their past manifestations of absence,
the hauntings and sleights of their
ancestral gardens. This is the way
ghosts achieve immortality.

And certainly they must worship
in silence an eternally vanishing god,
almost witnessed, almost possessed,
created naturally in the likeness
of themselves. A god of ghosts
who is not a ghost, after all, would be
a very strange thing.

The ghosts of this garden are like
the emptiness of pods and husks
under midnight snow when the moon
has passed, like the pause following
the clank and lock of the gate
at dusk, like the inevitable in motion
beyond the cosmic horizon. Strange,
what void these ghosts would leave
should the garden be ever without them.

tabula rasa

The landscape in this country is entirely
bare and blank, undistinguished
by any feature, except for a stitch
of swallows appearing and disappearing

above the sky-smooth lake, in and out
through the portals invented by their own
journeys. Here alone is absence, except
for many tiny punctures in the overall,

seeming like the prints of thorny grass
crickets, the pinpoint instincts of gripping
lizard toes, the stinging bristles of musk
thistle and the lesser spikes of lattice

spider. This is a dull, unbroken scape,
except for a pinnacle, a balustrade of forest,
except for a rip of hound yelping and then
another, and the jagged red slash

of a rooster’s occasional “chicchirichi,”
except for a multitude of cracks in the oblivion
through which appear many eyes, yellow
of black cat on a tile roof, pierce of preying

gull, two glassy prongs of woodland
snail, old man in grey cap with cigarette.
This country is still and void, except
for a funnel of attention from which

emerges an imagination lacking all
countenance until it begins together
with a skitter of lizard nails, an old man
flicking ash, a two-pronged snail

and its glistening swill, a vista of gull’s eye
at prey, the play of chicchirichi, a lake of sky
opened by swallow doorways to form
the creation of its own reality.

this little glade, remember

When lying beneath a ponderosa
pine, looking up through layers
of branches, mazes of leaf-spikes
and cones—contemplation grows
receptive to complexity,
the pleasant temptation of pine
scented tangle. Sky as proposition
is willingly divided and spliced
into a thesis of weaves and hallows.

Name them something else
if you wish, but needled shadow
and substance are, in this hour,
an architecture of philosophy.

And a rising wind, called “a rough
and bawdy wind” by a rough and bawdy
voice, is that wind and that voice
transformed. The structure of words
sways and bends in the blow.

Looking away into the clear sky,
expectation shifts. Vision becomes
a welcome to guests of crows in new
dimensions who themselves become
not only depth and horizon in a circus
of wings but old vision’s startling visitors.

Not soul alone, but soul consumed
by a single bee descending into the center
of a purple mountain lily is soul
to a soul suckled in sleep.

Earth and human together
form a unique being. A brief era
of immortality is lent to each
by the other. Move momentarily
now—with hovering granite cliff,
with sun-stripe flick of perhaps
vagrant shrew, with raised tack
of mighty larkspur—into this company.

into their own

Spirits are rising even now
out of the spines of sleeping hyena,
camel, steppe fox, golden jackal,

emanating from the points of gizzard
shad, bonefish, bee fly, stream creeper,
shades and the sovereignty of shades,

out of the breasts of dormant pika
and singing vole and up through the deep
from musk turtle and crayfish buried

in a pond-bottom mud like the most definite
of invisible intentions, images coming through
the shards and errors of storms and droughts,

beyond mangrove swamps, over
the rims of rolling taiga tides and snow
fields, the patterns of city sparrow,

ribbon seal, porpoise and pigeon emerging
from all night and farther back, spirits,
apprehensions of scab worm and lug

worm, blue pitta and biting louse,
singular, on their own, the idea of lantern bug,
corncrake, nut clam and great piddock,

infant and crone, by heaven, by earth,
rain or wind, not merely phantom or specter,
but the defining crux of dead-leaf

cricket, bushbuck, springbok,
implication of prawn and spider shell,
force of rufous-handed howler, reef
heron and bush pig appearing in essence
like the first stars of their own bones,
finfoot, trumpeter, lily-trotter, diamond

and jesting, as emblematic as the breath
of caves, as assertive as a cusp or crescent
of stone against sky, and where

they will arrive, there a single word,
surpassing and unequivocal, will be arriving
simultaneously to enfold them.