Six Poems

Jorie Graham

PRAYER

Am I still in the near distance

where all things are overlooked

if one just passes by. Do you pass

by?

I love the idea of consequence.

Is that itself consequence—(the idea)?

I have known you to be cheap

(as in not willing to pay out the extra

length of

blessing, weather, ignorance—all other

[you name them] forms of exodus).

What do I (call) you after all the necessary

ritual and protocol

is undertaken? Only-diminished?

Great-and-steady-perishing? Unloosening

thirst,

or thirst unloosening ribbony storylines

with births

and history’s ever-tightening

     plot

attached? We’re in too deep the bluebird

perched on

the seaweed-colored

limb (fringed with sky as with ever-lightening echoes of

   those selfsame light-struck weeds, those

   seas)

seems to be chattering at me. Too deep?

Someplace that is all speech?

Someplace everything can be said to be

about?

Will we all know if it’s blindness, this

way of seeing

when it becomes

apparent? Is there, in fact [who could

tell me

this?] a

we? Where? The distances have everything in their

grip of

in-betweenness.

For better [she said] or for worse [he said]

taking their place alongside the thirst

in line, something vaguely audible about

the silence

(a roar

actually) (your sea at night) but not as

fretful nor as monstrously tender

as the sea wind-driven was

     earlier on

in “creation.” Oh creation!

What a mood that was. Seeding then dragging-up life and

death in swatches

for us to forage in. Needle, story, knot, the

knot bit off,

the plunging-in of its silvery proposal,

stitch stitch still clicks

the bird still on

its limb, still in the mood, at the very edge

of the giddy

woods

through which even this sharpest noon must

bleed, ripped into

flickering bits.

It is nothing compared to us

is it, that drip and strobe of the old-world’s

 gold

 passaging-through,

nothing bending its forwardness, nothing

being bent

by it (though the wind, rattling the whole business,

would make one think

it so). Nothing

compared. And yet it is

there, truly there, in all sizes, that dry

creation—

woods, dappling melancholias of singled-out

limb-ends, lichened trunk-

flanks—shocked

transparencies as if a rumor’s just passed

   through

leaving this trail of inconclusive

  trembling bits of some

  momentous story.

Was it true, this time, the rumor?

The wherefore of our being here?

Does it come true in the retelling?

and truer in

the re-

presenting? It looks like laughter as the

wind picks up and the blazing is tossed

from branch to branch, dead bits, live

bits,

new growth taking the light less brightly than

the blown-out lightning-strikes.

Look: it is as if you are remembering

the day

you were born. The you. The newest witness. Bluish then

empurpling then

pink and ready to begin continuing.

Lord of objects. Lord of bleeding and self-

    expression.

I keep speaking this to you, as if in pity

at the gradual filling of the vacancy

by my very own gaze etcetera. Also the

words—here and here—hoping

this thing—along with all else that

wears-out—will

do. I think

about you. Yet is only thinking omnipresent?

Omniscience, omnipotence: that is all drama.

But omnipresence: time all over the

  place!

It’s like a trance, this time unspooling in

 this telling.

Like land one suspects must be there, but where?

The ocean kisses every inch of the seeable.

We live. We speak at the horizon. After a

while even the

timidity

wears off. One speaks. One is not mad.

One lives so long one feels the noticing

in all one sees.

Years. Chapters.

Someone is asking for your hand. One turns

to speak.

One wishes so one could be interrupted.

AFTERWARDS

I am beneath the tree. To the right the river is melting the young sun.

And translucence itself, bare, bony, feeding and growing on the manifest,

frets in the small puddles of snowmelt sidewalks and frozen lawns hold up

full of sky.       

From this eternity, where we do not resemble ourselves, where

resemblance is finally

beside (as the river is) the point,

and attention can no longer change the outcome of the gaze,

the ear too is finally sated, starlings starting up ladderings of chatter,

    all at once all to the left,

    invisible in the pruned back

hawthorn, heard and heard again, and yet again

    differently heard but silting

the head with inwardness and making always a

  dispersing but still

coalescing opening in the listener who

cannot look at them exactly,

since they are invisible inside the greens—though screeching-full in

 syncopations of yellowest,

 fine-thought, finespun

rivering of almost-knowables. “Gold” is too dark. “Featherwork”

        too thick. When two

appear in flight, straight to the child-sized pond of

 melted snow,

and thrash, dunk, rise, shake, rethrashing, reconfiguring through

reshufflings and resettlings the whole body of integrated

featherwork,

they shatter open the blue-and-tree-tip filled-up gaze of

  the lawn’s two pools,

breaking and ruffling all the crisp true sky we had seen living

  down in that tasseled

earth. How shall we say this happened? Something inaudible

has ceased. Has gone back round to an other side

of which this side’s access was [is] this bodywidth of

still sky

deep in just-greening soil? We left the party without a word.

We did not change, but time changed us. It should be,

it seems, one or the other of us who is supposed to say—lest

there be nothing—here we are. It was supposed to become familiar

(this earth). It was to become “ours.” Lest there be nothing.

Lest we reach down to touch our own reflection here.

Shouldn’t depth come to sight and let it in, in the end, as the form

the farewell takes: representation: dead men:

lean forward and look in: the raggedness of where the openings

are: precision of the limbs upthrusting down to hell:

the gleaming in: so blue: and that it has a bottom: even a few clouds

if you keep              

attending: and something that’s an edge-of: and mind-cracks: and how the

poem is       

about that: that distant life: I carry it inside me but

can plant it into soil: so that it becomes impossible

to say that anything swayed

from in to out: then back to “is this mine, or yours?”: the mind

seeks danger out: it reaches in, would touch: where the subject

 is emptying,

 war is:

morality play: preface: what there is to be thought: love:

begin with the world: let it be small enough.

GULLS

Those neck-pointing out full bodylength and calling

outwards over the breaking waves.

Those standing in waves and letting them come and

go over them.

Those gathering head-down and over some one

      thing.

Those still out there where motion is

primarily a pulsing from underneath

and the forward-motion so slight they lay

their stillness on its swelling and falling

and let themselves swell, fall …

Sometimes the whole flock rising and running just

as the last film of darkness rises

leaving behind, also rising and falling in

tiny upliftings,

almost a mile of white underfeathers, up-turned, white spines

    gliding over the wet

sand, in gusts, being blown down towards

  the unified inrolling awayness

  of white. All things turning white through

breaking. The long red pointing of lowering sun

going down on (but also streaking in towards) whoever

might be standing at the point-of-view place

from which this watching. This watching being risen

from: as glance: along the red

blurring and swaying water-path:

to the singular redness: the glance a

being-everywhere-risen-from: everywhere

cawing, mewing, cries where a

single bird lifts heavily

just at shoreline, rip where

its wing-tips (both) lap

backwash, feet still in

the wave-drag of it, to coast

on top of its own shadow and then down to not

landing.

*

Also just under the wave a thickening where

sun breaks into two red circles upon the

  carried frothing—

white and roiling, yes, yet unbreakably red—red pushed (slicked) under

   each wave (tucked) and, although breaking, always

   one—(as if from the back-end of distance red)—

and that one flowing to

here to slap the red it carries in glisten-sheets

up onto shore and (also as if onto)

my feet.

*

[Or onto my feet, then into my eyes] where red turns into “sun” again.

So then it’s sun in surf-breaking water: incircling, smearing: mind not

knowing if it’s still wave, breaking on

itself, small glider, or if it’s “amidst” (red turning feathery)

or rather “over” (the laciness of foambreak) or just what—(among

the line of also smearingly reddening terns floating out now

on the feathery backedge of foambroken

looking)—it is.

*

The wind swallows my words one

  by

one. The words leaping too, over their own

  staying.

Oceanward too, as if being taken

  away

into splash—my clutch of

words

swaying and stemming from my

   saying, no

echo. No stopping on the temporarily exposed and drying rock

out there            

to rub or rest where nothing else

grows.

And truly swift over the sands.

As if most afraid of being re-

   peated.

Preferring to be dissolved to

   designation,

backglancing stirrings,

wedged-in between unsaying and

 forgetting—

what an enterprise—spoken out by

   me as if

to still some last place, place becoming even as I speak

   unspeakable

and so punctually—not even burnt

by their crossing through the one great

 inwardness of

mind, not by the straining to be held (grasped) by my

   meanings:

“We shall have early fruit

this year” one of the shades along the way

calls out,

and “from the beginning” (yet further on). Words: always face-down:

listening falling upon them (as if from

    above):

listening greedy, able to put them to death,

flinging itself upon them: them open and attached

so hard to

what they carry:

the only evidence in them of having

     been.

And yet how they want to see behind themselves,

as if there is something

back there, always, behind these rows I

   gnaw the open with,

feeling them rush a bit and crane to see beneath themselves,

and always with such pain, just after emerging,

twisting on their stems to see behind, as if there were a

sun   

back there they need, as if it’s a betrayal,

this single forward-facing: reference: dream of: ad-

    mission: re

semblance: turning away from the page as if turning to a tryst:

the gazing-straight-up at the reader there filled with ultimate

fatigue: 

devoted servants: road signs: footprints: you are not alone:

slowly in the listener the prisoners emerge:

slowly in you reader they stand like madmen facing into the wind:

nowhere is there any trace of blood

spilled in the service of kings, or love, or for the sake of honor,

or for some other reason.

EVOLUTION

My nakedness is very slow.

I call to it, I waste my sympathy.

Comparison, too, is very slow.

Where is the past?

I sense that we should keep this coming.

Something like joy rivulets along the sand.

I insist that we “go in.” We go in.

One cannot keep all of it. What is enough

of it. And keep?—I am being swept away—

what is keep? A waking good.

Visibility blocking the view.

Although we associate the manifest with kindness,

we do. The way it goes where it goes, slight downslope,

like the word “suddenly,” the incline it causes.

Also the eye’s wild joy sucked down the slope the minutes wave

by wave  

pack down and slick.

The journey—some journey—visits me.

Then the downslope once again.

And how it makes what happens

    always more heavily

laden, this self only able to sink (albeit also

  lifting as in a

sudden draught)

 into the future. Our future. Where everyone

    is patient.

Where all the sentences come to complete themselves.

Where what wants to be human still won’t show

    its face.

VIA NEGATIVA

Gracious will. Gracious indistinct.

Everything depends on the point where nothing can be said.

From there we can deduce how

from now on nothing will be like.

Here lies: a border then the un-

just. Do I have, for example,

a heart? Does it only feel if you make “sense” of me?

Can it, for example, make me “see”?

Can it make me not see?

That we shall never know, of each other now, more.

That there is a no more. Hot and singular.

Surrounded by our first-persons: the no-more.

Before death’s obligatory plurality.

But I do know you by heart.

Also know other things by heart.

Interior, spiral, damnation, your name.

What would be the opposite of “you”?

When I “think,” it is near the future, just this

side of it.

Something I can’t conceive of without saying you.

The desert is fueled. My desert is fueled.

Daybreak a chaos in which things first come forth

then mix

as in an oasis, thirsty

for distinguishment.

Then the angels who need bodies to walk in.

Then something breaking light further as in: “it came to

pass,” or  

the way my words, encountered, are cancelled,

especially if true, and how they insist on encounter:

finally: in the world: “the impossible”: “the little”:

“in the house over there”: “elsewhere than here”:

What is this (erasure) (read on) is it a warning:

omit me: go back out: go back in: say:

no way to go in: go in: measure:

the little fabric vanishes, ascends, descends, vanishes,

say twenty seconds, say wall

(at the same time there is a specific temperature)

(so that eventually the light goes down all the lights go out

together  

till the level is reached where a fall begins) (more or less

long) 

COVENANT

She was being readied by forces she did not

recognize. This in an age in which imagination

is no longer all-powerful. Where if you had

to write the whole thing down, you could.

(Imagine: to see the whole thing written down.)

Everything but memory abolished.

All the necessary explanations also provided.

A very round place: everyone is doing it.

“It”: a very round and glad place.

Feeling life come from far away, like a motor approaching.

And in its approach: that moment when it is closest, so loud, as if

not only near you, but in you.

And that being the place where the sensation of real property

begins. Come. It is going to pass, even though right

now

it’s very loud, here, alongside, life, life, so glad to be in it,

no?, unprotected, thank you, exactly the way I feel.

And you? Lord how close it comes. It has a

seeming to it

so bright it is as if it had no core.

It all given over to the outline of seem:

still approaching, blind, open, its continuing elsewhere unthinkable as a

gear-shift   

at this speed.   

Approaching as if with a big question.

No other system but this one and it growing larger.

All at once, as if all the voices now are suddenly one voice.

Ah, it is here now, the here. [Love, where is love, can it too

be this thing that simply grows insistently louder]

[It seems impossible it could ever pass by] [she thought]

the eruption of presentness right here: your veins

[Meanwhile a dream floats in an unvisited field]

[There by the edge of the barn, above the two green-lichened

stones, where for an instant a butterfly color of chicory

      flicks, dis-

appears]How old-fashioned: distance: squinting it

into            

view. Even further: rocks at year’s lowest tide.

The always-underneath excitedly exposed to heat, light, wind, the

being-seen. Who could have known a glance could be

so plastic. Rubbery and pushing down on all the tiny hissing overbright

greens.  

O sweet conversation: protozoa, air: how long have you been speaking?

The engine [of the most] is passing now.

At peak: the mesmerization of here, this me here, this me

passing now.

So as to leave what behind?

We, who can now be neither wholly here nor disappear?

And to have it come so close and yet not know it:

how in time you do not move on:

how there is no “other” side:

how the instant is very wide and bright and we cannot

ever  

get away with it—the instant—what holds the “know”

[as if gently, friend, as if mesmerized by love of it] [love of

(not) making sense] (tide coming in) (then distance taking

the perplexion      

of engine      

whitely in) (the covenant, the listening, drawing its parameters out

just as it approaches its own unraveling)

the covenant: yes: that there be plenitude, yes,

but only as a simultaneous emptying—of the before, where it came

from—and of the after (the eager place to which it so

“eagerly” goes). Such rigorous logic, that undulating shape

we make of      

our listening      

to it: being: being on time: in time: there seeming to be no actual

being:  

all of it growing for a time closer and closer—as with a freight

of sheer abstract      

abundance (the motor      

sound)(is all) followed by the full selfishness (of such

  well being) of the being

(so full of innocence) actually (for the instant) here:

I love you: the sky seems nearer: you are my first

        person:

let no one question this tirelessness of approach:

love big enough to hide the cage:

tell them yourself who you are:

no victory: ever: no ever: then what “happens”:

you can hear the hum at its most constant: steady: the era:

love bestowed upon love close-up:

(quick, ask it of heaven now, whatever it was you so

    wished to

know) the knowing: so final: yet here is the road, the

context, ongoingness,

and how it does go on regardless of the strangely sudden coming un-

done of    

its passing away.

Silence is welcomed without enthusiasm.

Listening standing now like one who removed his hat

out of respect for      

the passage.      

What comes in the aftermath they tell us is richly

satisfying.

No need to make a story up, for instance.

We have been free now ever since, for instance.