Concerning Self-Examination and the Recollection of God
Self-Examination
You came into this world for one purpose,
and that was to learn
the story of all beings,
but you let the account fade.
You could have asked—they were willing to tell all—
but every hour you neglected dreams
and accumulated regret.
For the whole of your life
you said one thing:
please show me the love in which I reside—
and one day,
in the presence of death,
you saw.
Ah, me.
Shadrach
Sometimes the god
is hanging up laundry
next to a furnace.
He nods, opens the furnace door,
beckons, steps in.
You know who he is,
and his two friends—
sometimes they wash themselves in flames,
sometimes I am washed too,
my skin crisp like gold foil,
sometimes that’s all there is:
just the walking,
and the heart still human, exultant—
for something has been understood
about the flame inside, the flame out,
about thought polished to a
molecule-loosening dagger
that permits all.
Meshack
Sometimes the god watches soap
and water slosh behind glass at a laundromat:
not even he can see who or what
is being cleansed—
he waits, like anyone would,
for an outcome
so he can start over
if he has to, or find some other reason
to link inner and outer,
self and self.
Abednego
No gods are visible,
but people buy groceries,
open and shut car doors beneath
unconscious rain from over the sea.
They are well within the view from my father’s window
where he sits in a chair
to watch a tree yield, light bend, the horizon
flex as darkness tidies itself
into a sharp drumroll.
I mail my letters,
pray he has time to catch that last
glint
of a mast.
Sooner or later I will try
to name that ship.
The Ship
You can choose what form the flame takes
just as I
chose the stone of your white forehead
on which to place my lips,
and that stone, now, entombs me.
I kept from you
my adoration, my passion,
and that you had my heart all along.
A broken cup.
So it is said, so I know
no one enters Heaven
without their father and mother,
some mending,
some rolling away of stones.
North
If the word for a ship means
glacier, even iceberg,
then there are limits to the world:
seven seas slip between
the known world
and its warm shadows,
opposites crack
the planet.
In the Earth’s core—
the fiery furnace.
Inside it, fierce gods
trim their nails,
shape-shift through the hours
it takes to forge a
single silver bangle.
West
Gold straw spikes through
the snow; the horizon
is the next lip of road.
A ball of fire in the sky,
buffalo bones and blue light
in the coulee:
once all the keys are turned
in the lock,
the mountains thin,
the sky tunes itself
to the eye.
All this a gift.
I was not hurt,
just dragging a wing
to lure evil away.
Death
In your heart is a window,
and a furnace in which gods walk, unharmed:
do not accept my word,
follow no one.
The effect of death
is on the heart:
a lamp goes out,
the soul is dismounted.
Don’t listen to me,
don’t run to it.
It sets off and abides.
No vision is necessary,
death is a bridge:
mirror its spaciousness
in the dark wood.
Dark Wood
Hostile to the traveller.
Southeast
Look there: your mother’s hands,
and a latch to reach her;
she understands desire:
how she longed for you.
Longing is a match,
heart with heart.
Look there: a woman and child
draw on the glass I mentioned
(shut or open, broken
or whole)—
snowflake
sun
moon
tree house smoke
fire fire fire
Gold stars on the leaves.
Who?
Someone tells you about serpents
and angels and your heart says:
three friends, a fiery furnace, a stairway,
garden, wood, flight…
Who do you think you are—Dante?
Oh, doubt and mystery. The gods
wash sweaters,
pair socks,
complete the divine between bouts
of carpentry.
The Carpenter
My father says, you cannot tell
the true metal, it is mixed in this world;
he says, let’s make a pact to talk to the dead;
he says, you can’t assess the system you’re in
when you’re in it;
he says, I’m tired of talking to all these spooks.
I crawl out from under the four directions,
to sit with him, on the arm of his recliner,
at a window that looks over a threading willow
to the sea;
we glimpse sails,
and my mother, in the square below,
swishing her skirts against her stockings.
Skirts
You pull my sweater
over my head,
unbutton my kilt,
slip off the pin.
Pajama top,
then bottom,
teeth brushed,
and prayers.
You sit on the bed
and I pleat your skirt
with my fingers;
your kisses pattern my face
like a constellation.
I turn my face toward time:
you step backward, out-of-bounds.
My father and I peer through the fog
that undoes you, feet to eyes,
strands of hair, maybe a ring:
he looks at me, finds you there
as I ready him
trousers, shirt, socks, underwear,
pajama top and bottom
for bed.
Good night
Good night
Here it is.
My friend tells me her dream and I listen fully.
About her son and daughter picking flowers.
They look like little marmots—first, the flowers
and then the children. It is a dream of marmots.
—P. K. Page, “Marmots,” Collected Poems, Volume II
Once, long ago the trees were frozen,
dull winter lowered, there were no flowers or choirs; my mother
still lived—yet the weight of grief, like a sack dully
hoarded, an armful of sad thought and mind
boarded over my eyes. I was an animal
kept warm, but why? Then light bleached the bed,
I sat up from my coffin—
My friend tells me her dream and I listen fully.
Ten dark-robed men stood nearby:
their presence surprised, like the earth mined,
or mountains gullied by time,
ten times the sharp incline and decline of the road.
One helped me step out,
and I stood, in my nightdress, the cold like a shower,
and the coffin folded like a suitcase on a dusty plain;
then the men left for the glacier points, perhaps to cave
or star or even higher.
They’d left her, not with food or water, but a memory—
about her son and daughter picking flowers.
I stood in a bowl of sand with seeds scattered among stones,
mountains on the far rim;
my hands searched the grains,
but change brought tears—and so the watered seeds awakened
until the grey alluvia bloomed,
grass hid the prairie in wind.
I gathered the hum of shortened shadows,
the petal’s face, the turn of hours,
the bees’ rhyme from asphodel to zinnia.
I counted fern-traced stones, sought
the touch of green, its smell…
Sometimes I spied the spill of contents
from that abandoned coffin, left to rot: stained plate and cup,
a faded garment—
then forgot as small animals, born to delight, stirred and crept.
They look like little marmots—first, the flowers
and then the children. It is a dream of marmots.
Then I crept from that rich garden
and stood at the mountain limit, my eyes ached at the sky
and opened to a glimpse of heaven,
an unstitch to every stitch, a Penelope’s longing.
My children swam through fields of colours,
the marmots slid within their burrows:
world’s evolution scryed their brains
and my children’s children.
When I awakened then, there was no more sorrow in me
than the next breath of the unknown.
God is the One who has set out for you, the stars,
that you may guide yourself by them
through the darkness of the land and of the sea.
We have detailed the signs for people who know.
—Sura 6, Verse 97, Qur’an
Once, when I lay awake in the morning,
the electrical sun igniting green
from the tall firs—
before the day I saw a tree stand still in the wind,
other trees’ branches weaving sharp as forks and pins around it,
its trunk a spear carrying the ochre sky;
before I saw a thrush land in the burnt grass
and fall dead, its wings and tail spread flat,
beak, breast, heart stilled,
and time passed, enough for me to call my daughter, drink coffee,
wonder why
nearby birds kept on with their beak-digging, foot-hopping—
and then the thrush sprang up, resurrected—
before all that, that one bright original morning—
I saw my life in a hive, and it spun through its figure eights,
its flower skimming, its constant alighting with others—
I saw its path within that brimming whole,
the preordained, if you like, honey-making episode—
as necessary,
for it described a minute packet of time and space—
the same way, you might say,
God is the One who has set out for you, the stars.
Perhaps I have said too much, done too much
in my busyness; but the hive is one thing,
and my heart, broken by understanding,
is another: it fluctuates against my chest wall,
it transcribes a tide
of inner and outer: it turns its love toward its loss—
and yearns for the touch of my mother’s heart—heartfelt
graze of her fingers, tentative trembling
arms, eyes green as a winter’s tale:
loss will finish me
and yet
I dream a woman, not her, who points out a square
of stars, four-square, like the foundation of all,
as if I knew the world better than I realize,
from stem to stern, could name those stars, call them friend,
navigate wilderness, say with certainty to others
that you may guide yourself by them.
The first chill weeks of September,
the stars eased from the forefront of sky:
a cooler breath suffused the atmosphere,
veiled the summer wandering. The price
of change? Hidden, but supposed
in the new quiet of bird and insect.
Still in the dark, I opened the door to the morning, let out the
who cowered beneath a stirring knot of wasps
wrapped to the porch light. They fled, at once, inside,
their whir and anger filled the hall:
then slowly, over days, they died
while my grief gathered,
through the darkness of the land and of the sea.
I’m recounting miracles, I guess,
private as the sound that sparked creation—
the hum of bees, the sough of wind that speaks
a single syllable. To stand outside the tangle
of thought and rest in surety a moment—
why name the angel?
It does its work the moment it awakes:
We have detailed the signs
for people who know.
Argo Navis
It is a great ship, with a high stern,
a ragged circle of stars for a sail,
blown ever westward along the southern horizon
by dark nebulae of dust and cold gas.
The keel is hundreds of light-years distant,
the compass, broken by the Milky Way,
brightens and fades—faint now for decades.
Who now will guide it over the trackless deeps
and the underworld of its passage?—
the sun, our sun, moves ever away.
In the dream my dead child’s hands
make finger shadows on the wall of night:
faint stars that signal home,
and despite all evidence,
that here is our refuge and our strength.
Coombe
A valley running up from the coast,
a basin, a bowl, a deep vessel,
a place to lie in tall grass,
held in your arms:
sheep run down upon us
like a spill of milk from the lip,
and the shadow speeds up one side
of the bowl, cold as iron,
claw cold;
day and night race away
like a stream over rocks,
with a joyful sound
time cupped,
like the earth cups
the hours of every day.
Our lives gather, a twist
of magic powder in a paper
that once set free,
could take us, say,
to a ship,
Navis means:
No-wise
None of us
No way
None of them
although they had the idea
that if you stepped out from a cliff
your foot stretched to the cradle of sky
you could fly.
Surprise Hussar
The most ordinary
of those you love
suddenly turns
and mounts a horse
you didn’t know was there;
it is plumed, decorated with silver,
and while you attempt to decode the sight
(he is white-uniformed, splendid)—
you wonder who you are
to have thought you knew him
or his gifts.
Could you handle a sword
if it presented itself,
do you know how to ride?
Carambolo UFO
If it weren’t for the night drive
along the hot road in the white car,
wheat, oranges, sand
all bled to ruts of sifted colour
in the headlights;
if I hadn’t seen for myself
the road divide
and beneath the curved edges of its fall,
the treasure itself, with its windows of gold,
its high walls,
then the word dropped out of the night
from a white web
might not have caught
at my heart
as it did
and said “city” as well as
your arms, your chest, the wide hand
of your pelvis,
the crown of your eyes.
Yes, I’m a believer
as the car lifts, as in a movie,
on a band of light,
a whip-hand of heat,
and I’ve made it, or missed it,
that ship.
Is the Divine Presence inside or outside the world?
It began with a cat in the desert
bringing the sun in its mouth,
the sun
burned its way
through charred skin,
obliterated the howled word.
Pain stirred the darkness:
gave it hunger
and a cry.
The earth
emerged raw, ready to be struck.
A woman with a cat’s head,
or just a cat,
or a human who
was put to death
stands at a threshold,
invites us to please,
after you,
pass.
Out of a deep hole in the snow
flies a rats tail.
Out of another deep hole—
a red fox.
Out of the third hole
rises Watch Dog:
he binds you
with a collar,
takes you for a walk.
The waters beneath the earth
flow into my emptiness.
You were reborn as an animal,
you felt no pain
when you were caught:
your paws became white.
Seven days after my death
I felt nothing.
I slide my rings
along your tail
while you are bathing.
You seduce me
with water
sprinkled on my face.
When rain falls
we consider the tree trunks
beneath the leaves.
The cat’s name is Rain Cloud
At the time of the flood
God’s cat killed a mouse,
its spirit sang the earth
out of existence,
almost.
The song emptied the eyes
of a woman,
released her milk.
Why?
When I kiss you,
you have my
soul
in front of the moonlight
in a paper sack,
ready weighted
with stones.
Under the ocean,
in the forest,
on the prairie,
in the desert, within a few miles of food,
lost, unfit for use,
sealed in a vase…
is a cat who went missing for three days,
and returned with a live falcon.
I opened my heart—
its navigable channels—
to Rain Cloud.
Is there a purpose to your life,
as a whole?