In the sense that the world is happened upon
and noticed—just as one morning the children
came into the garden where the sun had streamed
through the larches: a perfect cone. They stepped
inside and felt for edges in the air,
asking if they should go or stay,
As if they were the cause of what
they had seen. They knew that to walk
away would be to leave in midsentence,
to turn from some gesture
that seemed urgently felt, but opaque
as a forgotten language. They were caught
Then, between wonder and its guilt,
the overbearing insistence of wonder
when it seems the up-staging of joy.
And they knew that the light would not remain
forever, whether they stayed or turned away.
Day after day the same thought
Of the country—the enormous effort of waste
and complicity mirrored in the old concerned
clichés. The struggle against forgetting
like a stream or hill eroding,
or a fissure spreading while
we sleep, for we imagine
The loss of nature only in terms
of the nature now lost, so far
from our imagining. When de Tocqueville
wrote his “Fifteen Days in the Desert,”
he said, “the forest seemed so icy,
the shadows so somber, the solitude
So absolute,” not knowing all
we could have made by now and that
what could pass away from the earth
would be the earth itself beyond
its use. Spellbound, he thought
of the desert as a kind of revolution
In which the vast and granular world
was falling into its own full future
and he could, unwittingly, and suddenly,
be at the apex of that minute collapse.
History was not a line, but a kind
of hourglass, turned upside down,
As if to time an egg, and infinitely
reversing its own small, steady
progress. (… a light that was a slow
uncovering, a cloth drawn back,
a lid before an eye—like a blessing
on the world, but who is the dreamer
To answer their question; the one who predicts
or the one who follows? The blasted tree
fell in the single field,
the charred bark and the root
lay tangled like a severed braid.)
The traveler arrived
In a landscape that until then
he had only hoped for, something
he could imagine when confronted
by emptiness: here and there
a cactus, a snake, what might be predicted—
drawn on the shed skin
Of the world, these would admit
a surface. He wrote “they have nothing
to fear from a scourge which is more formidable
to republics than all these evils
combined; namely, military glory …”
The children had stood beneath a perfect
Cone of light, which seemed a gesture
urgently made by a speaker now far
in the distance. All day
the same thought returned: a desert
filled with things beyond use
and a will receded. Lieutenants
And lieutenants of lieutenants
drawing a sandy line, wanting
to be used and of use.
A small cot beneath an enormous
sky: indifferent, mathematical, true.
The abandoned blocks of apartments, the rubble
Strewn like dunes across the view,
caverns where vast
machines have been severed—
the leaking suitcase, the turquoise glass
around the pull toy. It’s all
spelled out in the new edition of
“The New Dark”: sensation, true
indifference to all that could be new.
How can particulars serve us when
all they evoke is the identity of surface,
the analogy of form which undermines
their history? The replacements arrive
On buses and carry sets of working
papers. They intend no resemblance to the living
or the dead, and no one can say
what they dream. They have nothing
to fear from … an empty country,
but the fires burning in infinite regression,
The smoke refusing all shape and measure,
the end of the long daylight of reason—
all consequence as soon forgotten
as the last moments of a revolution.
A prophet in a frock coat gazed
out into the desert, imagining
Stars as a system of justice,
reciprocal, mathematical, true …
That night I dreamed
of Constantine’s dream and how
in Piero’s great fresco cycle
the Emperor’s face between the white sheets
Is so absent and calm; his secretary drowsily
listens as the flanking guards hold
their conversation—there
on the eve of what they picture
will be an exhausting and cruel disaster.
And how the angel, like an arrow, or wildly
Plummeting bird—torqued from a sky
so simultaneously brilliant and dark
that it, too, seems more
miraculous than made—spreads from the swift
left wing a perfect net
of light and drapes it over the great
Red and golden cone of Constantine’s
tent. And then the two folds
of light swell forward—one
of this world, and one so surely
not—toward us like a pulse, thus stopping
time in time …
To know what might
be prevented, to see the luminous
intervention, ephemeral
and true as the morning
light cast
drifting through the branches.
I understood that there must have been
a light like a slow uncovering, or a cloth
drawn back with all the pomp of a blessing.
There must have been a lid
long before an eye, a device for seeing
before there was seeing. And the way in which
It came can’t be separated from what
it is—like a matter to be worked
through so work can begin. When a line
recedes, it seems that time passes, regardless
of beginning, edge, or end. And the seeming
is like an event to us, with all
The consequence of something intended. It’s just
that the shape is prior—and not to see it
is not a failure or collapse of
will or faith, but a kind
of belatedness that calls and calls
again, for care.
In the sense that the pulse of the heart
beats before its being, and out
of the first layers all
the organs will slowly form—a head,
barely perceptible, surrounds
the start of the brain
And a gaping hole appears before
the hungry, speaking mouth. Below,
at the beginning, the pointed tail
will sway and the forty
blocks of bone will start to turn:
vertebrae, brain, and backbone
Curving while the sooty eyes lie open
like coins in the ivory skull.
Branchial arms and legs, gill-like
projections that become the lower
jaw, the neck and face suspended
in the amniotic sac:
What has motion becomes
a name in motion, growing toward
an end it does not know.
Chorion and amnion,
placenta, cord, and rib; dermis,
epidermis, and the shell’s
Filmy skin; sweat glands, sebaceous
glands, and then the emergent surface—
downy with soft hairs swimming,
soft hairs wavering—
from their follicle anchors.
The hands begin as shapeless paddles,
Then fingers form and nerves spark,
stranded, stringing out into brightness;
the cells of the eyes diverge.
Ragged halo, chorionic villi
—jerk, swish, hiccup,
flex and flower.
The forehead grows, the vessels of blood
thread, visible, under transparent
skin. The nail beds rise,
the hands are shaped and find
themselves, grasping like to like.
The head turns, the face moves
And a gasping breath begins
its sore, impenetrable
singing. The hollow stalk
emerges, the stalk-end
thickens and forms a sphere, meeting
the skin’s interior.
It turns on itself,
inward like a cup, and the base of the cup
becomes the fundus; the covering skin
becomes the retina. Inside the lens
begins to glisten. An iris
grows inward from the edges
Like a circle of reeds
leaning toward the watery
light, becoming light and darkness,
then color, shape, and motion.
And from the embryo’s thin skin
a hollow forms beside the hindbrain,
Then the inner ear and the outer
ear, the hammer, anvil, and stirrup.
They bring the hard pounding
of the blood beyond touch,
to the place of beat and interval.
Now it hears and hears
itself in the pounding
of the other, and somersaults
into being: the one with the fontanel,
the waxy vernix, the matted lanugo
and its whorled tattoos.
One who is touched,
became touch and shape; who came
into the light, became light
and movement; who moved
into sound, became the speaking silence;
sent into time, became time emerging.
As the past increases, the future is diminished
and fear assumes the features of love.