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.

Once

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 marmotsfirst, 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.

The Stars

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.

Night Words

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.

The Cat Project

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?