1. ON
When the convulsive earth
arched under the sea
its craggy ribs were
blurted out where reefs had been
into the golden warmth for a
fraction of a second of the one
day that’s a thousand years.
In the same breath, on what was risen up
swarms of wee morsels mightier than
seafoam, rockface, under weather
brought what had emerged to be
grasses of the field
breathing that sun-washed sky.
On the face of the earth
trees and tiny Arctic flowers
face upwards; animals
with velvet paws, or hoofs,
all seem to look away towards the
falling-away edge of the earth.
My face, among these others,
ours, are not as though
among these others.
2. WITHIN
Studies by night. By day
blinks at the intricate
script of the world. A levelling
fuzzy peach morning-light
blurs what it would
make plain. Not
soundlessly. Whirrings.
Faint sighs. Intrudes
the throb of self selecting self
out of what was suggestive of a
singing part. Unravels
some syllables of the music, in
withdrawing again.
Waits. Cannot not be expressed
but in some foreign idiom
that seems fitting although
unspoken.
Waits
unscrolling somewhat
lop-sidedly from
the effort of withholding
intrusion. Tense. Welcomes
the night’s return, and sleep.
3. UNDER
A morning triangle of shadow
divides this field. On three
sides the building bulks.
A glimmering mesh of some
impenetrable composite substance
seals in the fourth. The grass-blades
are metal tongues, so hinged
that two or three persons, let out
under the pitiless sky
for daily exercise,
can shuffle through it,
or wade, or clatter and kick
as competency or their residual
savagery permits.
These little metal grass-blades
are mathematically precise
like tree-trunks in a forested
field in France.
Somewhere the warden
sits, nettled by the clicking
of footsteps in the field,
or yard.
People outside
steel themselves to resist
any convulsive surge to storm
this new Bastille.
Nobody seems to know
why some are in there, some,
less contained, out here.
Only a scattering
at any one time stand, and then
move on across their own
shadows in the wide courtyard.
Remember, even food and drink
turned into metal. Then it was gold,
under a Midas touch that menaces
and unmakes
heroes and revolutionaries.
People’s singular sense of things
is everywhere too private
(or too pre-arranged)
for any foreseeable action but
perseverance only.
The skies will ember into the
deep darkness of another
night, and sleep —
that chrysalis of waking.
4. WHEN
“O God, God of all flesh…,” *
supreme artist, originator
of all designs, who sees:
for us the entering in
is long deferred, while
“praise” in our tongue
is merged with “price” —
(could we go back to “laud”, or
that other word from
“loben”,
instead?)
Far off is that horizon
of calm and contained
joy that are wholly
unselfconscious, simple,
lovely. Where is the holy
vanishing-point
where life began and daily may
bring us alive
again? Is this
being alive?
The far off isn’t, and is all
that is.
5. WHERE
Hard-edged day time does
usually recur. Same glare,
same silent
engrossing shadow.
The park is lifting up
bare branches in bouquets.
One, shafted by the sun, offers its small
flambeau. Wires
tangle underfoot and would entangle.
This place seems unfrequented.
But specks like filings
move (tilted, trickling?) (alive!)
on a dry root.
Oak trees rustle
for long months, driving
their roots down still.
6. OUT
Though helpless, here,
whoever cried out and was heard
in darkness, in quietness,
is charged:
stand; wait here,
for some lame stumbler, for
random young shufflers,
for skyfall.
Stand, day in, day out,
readied for day upon day.
The frozen sheets
after we fetched them in
crackled as we folded them
for propping, splayed
out on the wooden racks
in the back kitchen.
Icy sunlight gleamed
on the waxed kitchen floor.
Down went a pair of brooms
criss-cross.
“This is the sword dance!”
and Katie showed me,
leaping and flashing. Note
this was not bonny Sco’land, it was
a lowering prairie 2 p.m. and at a
scourging 40 below!
At first light, on a
certain day, someone appeared, bearing
a floor-piece on his shoulders.
Its underside was flat; the other side
had wooden cleats between the wooden slats.
When he laid it level, and inside there,
you saw its wood was sun-bleached.
Nobody saw how he got in!
The old hinged metal tongues that were the
grass-blades were on a level other than
where he now steadily walked
towards the little exit-entrance doorway to
this exercise yard or punishment area.
We numbly witnessed as
a hissing skirt of fire swept
under and around
him and his platform. An air hose
soon restored the metal grass.
The solitary, once again
emerged to pace as every clicking day
they did.
Among the young, some spoke
secretly hoping to turn
their hero’s grisly defeat into some
concerted attempt,
maybe more
influential and more daunting, to
unearth the incarcerator of
so many, singly — and
then to get word back, to stir up
recruits, to reconnoitre
deeper into the
secret power and the source of power.
Among the older, worn by day
upon hypnotic day,
the hope was hope for stamina
not for success, and for
courage for those more able.
“O God, God of all flesh!”
Behold the immured, the lost champion,
the dangerously young,
and us who merely persevere
along the borders of
the always unthinkable!
7. AFTER
Post-modern:
i.e. those who (he said)
in honesty of heart
deny any eternal verities; being
searchers for plausible
truth, they humbly
substitute for the old symbols,
what they affirm as
“the logocentric.”
You know their thoughtful
responsible faces, their
capacity for goodness, their
willingness to show
good will.
They shoulder only their part of the
burden of living as a
matter of course.
Who can help warmly
appreciating such people
among us, leaders of thought,
careful, and when necessary, bold
in action?
How different it would be, today, to
“take up your cross and follow Me”, to
“take My yoke upon you, learn….”
Take both? Take what’s to hand? Find
one follows the other? or find the same bewildering
burden?
It makes no sense today
to talk this way, nor did
in A.D. 30, thereabouts.
No, but once heard it condenses
somehow. Cautions. Compels — can
flood a person, earth and sea and sky — all that
originated in a like
mystery (all who will die from
this reasonable lifetime we have known) —
with one
overwhelming focus,
for what remains of your
lifetime’s doings and responsibilities,
held by a steadying pulse.
And whether some finally
together break out ’til
the stars fall, or
a sudden global change
freezes inhabitants’ pulses
one artist who, in one
impulse once called out, from surging
waters and fires and molten
rock
our earth, our little lives,
maintains, Himself, the
no longer appearing
structures.
*the cry of Moses and Aaron over Korah et al.