II

AMA ET FAC QUOD VIS

 

for Piritta Maavuori

 

 

The God of Saint Paul, who is

'no respecter of persons'

 

might just as easily have been

the self

 

– that loves what it will

and watches us quicken and fade

with the passing of time

 

as calmly as we watch our shadows form

and lengthen, with each shift and slant of light.

 

* * *

 

Silence is argument carried on by other means.

ERNESTO GUEVARA

 

What we intend

and what we allow to happen

 

is anyone's guess.

 

All week my voice was failing – first husky, then strained,

till it guttered away to a whisper

 

and disappeared;

guttered away

 

this morning, when the snow began to fall,

whiting out streets and gardens, muffling the cars,

 

until it seemed the only good reply

was silence:

not

 

the quiet of dismay,

but what Guevara thought of as the argument

continued – carried on

 

by other means – that cold and salty pact

the body makes with things unlike itself

 

– a snowfall, or a gust of Russian wind,

the evanescence of an upper room

that might be something new, or someone gone

 

a moment since:

and how it is transformed

by what it never finds:

no soul; no

shadow.

 

* * *

 

Propose what you like;

propose

 

causality

the notion of the self

how one thing follows another

in grim succession

 

it only takes a moment in the wind

to break that argument.

 

* * *

 

Consider the body: changeable, incomplete,

yet still continuous:

think how it holds the perfect likenesses

of all the former selves that it is not,

how casually it gathers and renews

the forms we have scarcely noticed – winter buds,

 

a flock of starlings turning on the air,

the bleached grass skirting the lake

or the snake-bark of maples –

 

and how, on a morning like this, with our everyday lives

suspended

in these white parentheses

 

we start again from scratch: the coming night;

the ferry that runs to the island;

the sullen ice;

 

the shapes we have scarcely noticed, bearing us on

o all we have yet to become

to the blank of a future.

 

* * *

 

I wake in the dark and the dream evaporates before I can grasp

the details

 

– something about a bell, and prints in the snow;

my dream self distinct from the person I seem in waking;

 

my dream self, bright and light-footed,

a holy, unclouded soul, tracking these prints

to the edge of a sycamore wood –

 

the details blurring and suddenly melting away

and only a moment's afterlife of joy:

the body a solid again, the mind a distraction,

the net of the slipshod entangling the peregrine heart.

 

* * *

 

In the small hours

awake and alone,

 

waiting for snow, or watching the snow as it falls,

from an upper room,

 

as far as I am from home,

and as strange as I seem,

 

what could I really prefer

to the weight of the self?

 

its deftness, on nights like this,

its immutable grace,

 

the only means I have

of bearing witness.

 

* * *

 

This morning I followed a trail

to the edge of the woods,

 

then felt the shadow watching as I lost

my nerve:

a brightness

 

slipped behind the rain;

an aftermath

of lanolin and dust.

 

* * *

 

Now I look back from the warmth

of a scentless house

 

with something foreign

cradled in my chest

 

and wonder that I took its weight

for safety, all those nights I passed untouched

 

and dreaming,

like a calf lulled in the dark

 

while something sweet

unfolds along the blade,

 

lifeblood

or rapture

taken for a song.