(born 1950)
PRIAM'S DAUGHTER
I. Touching the Moon
A slice of light, half-curled above
the tree line, settled to smoky threads
along the horizon as night dimpled
snow in the dark fields and the creek's
cold edges thickened to a polished spill
the color of old birches. After dark,
the wind right and pines hovering
close to the ground, clouds rubbed
against a cut of stars that slipped
in a darkening slide to a clearing
half-lost in the mountains. It was a place
where dark flowers grow and cicadas grate
in solitude and vacancy, the sound
of their strumming suspended
like dust in the faint light that draped
the faded edges of the sky. She found
that place alone, listening to the wind,
as we quivered among the noises
of that starlit night and watched her
climbing over shadows that lay
like dark bruises on the season-plowed soil.
She climbed to touch the moon,
to break the trance of the nightfall
that surrounded her, push through
the cold clouds that curled north on the wind
where the hill ascends and reclaim
the emptiness she said was ours.
We were all divining life in those
dark corners then, skirting
its dangerous edges, each stirred
by a different pulse of the wind.
Caught there like a sift of leaves
against the tree line, we did not want
to understand when she said that nothing
lay beyond the things she feared
and lived by, that morning
always came to her in a heaving
under clear sheets of water,
that hollow trunks of trees
are warm as blood and their dark wood
opens to seed beds where the year's dead
are transfigured by the moon
and skim the earth like feeder roots
pulled loose from the lost ground below.
We watched her, in a dream
without sleep, waiting for a signal,
a wisp of smoke or quiet tapping of stone
to pierce the shadows. Her face was
as disconsolate as the moon she reached for
and all around gaped open burrows
where small animals slept, their soft skins
hardening white in the unaccustomed thudding
and jostling of the night air. Its odd light
seeped to our marrow and we moved
toward that place with arms extended,
drifting past each other like dark footfalls
in empty passageways before stumbling
into silence. The patterns in the sky
unexpectedly changed and she was
suddenly gone, a rustling of birds
in the veerings of the wind.
Although we had come to sink with her
into a nuzzling of thorns
in the gray scrub bushes, there
was nothing else we could see
in that place, only clouds and trees
awash in a dark green light
that dissolved to an abstract of angles
and lines on the water. The chill
in the wind smoldered in the darkness
and the hours before dawn opened slowly,
like the shell of a dying newborn bird.
In that light, traced like panic against
the paling sky, we knew she was gone,
a scuttle of mist thickening to the cool dark
of the earth, a quick return to dust,
and we were left alone with the moon
hanging black against the stars,
silent and forbidding, and the sound of the wind
whistling endlessly across the hills.
II. The Nightingale's Song
The air tasted of metal and the sky
was passionless as glass. In that slow
realization of light, as clouds
unraveled the fine dust and swept lines
of the moon above my head, I stretched out
my hands and the frozen flowers
in the meadows blossomed, rainbows
in the trees' hanging branches
glowed with the bodies of fragile butterflies,
time drifted like moonrise across wet ice
in a spark and warp of heady smoke.
Wait! I can hear them. But I don't think
they pity us. We blend to sorrow and strife
in the wounds and leavings of new birth,
and hunger advances in the wild hour,
and I wait here for my breath to settle,
for the fear to go away as the nagging surge
of needled hearts startled in every direction
probes like braided wire for the parch and peel
of blood. I lay for a long time near the stumps
of the yellowing pines, a patch of fallen white
against the fading green, bristling in flutters
and shivers, and heard their voices
pulling my bones this way and that,
whistling in the caverns behind my eyes
like the climax of some unspeakable hour.
They could not hear me when I cried
that this dream was not enough,
the work of the spirit falling to elegy and ruin,
the way back a lost moment hammered
in secrecy hard as steel in the forge of night.
I am blocked whatever way I turn, in cough
and blind panic. And I know there is nothing
beyond the things I've feared and lived by,
nothing they could find or name, only the darting hiss
and click of the moon's pale blood, slow hunger
stinging eyes fixed on the grass, stamens
veined and coiling. They don't believe me,
bloodless and apologetic, though all my life
I've named that weariness of the heart
that scatters quickly into the night like dry leaves,
building patterns that long for extinction,
a hundred gray shapes that pass among the trees
like a tide of blind mouths flying off to oblivion.
Root clenching root, blending to hard earth,
the hypothesis of dark desires,
and the life that moved within me
silent now and thick-fingered as roots
sprouting from clods and dead holes
stretched and laboring forward, sinews oiled,
tasting stone. I know they didn't pity me
even as the years passed across
the dry-veined sky and clotted hard
among the oaks and pines and lines
of cedar angled thin in the snow.
They don't remember that now
or understand why I need the moon's
pure light above me, high in the hills,
a vacuum into which everything collapses,
stripped to the numbness of bone.
I cannot reach it. I cannot reach it.
Listen! Do you understand I am not
this empty space that splinters to light,
the womb of earth, infinity's blind shore?
I climb only to touch the moon, to reclaim
the thing that once was mine, afraid
that my story has already had its end. Deeper
than the eye can follow, its pale light stiffens
in the mist, plain, placid and clear, and trails off
forever in a welter of silver that glowers
and pierces every shadow. I've heard them say it,
and in my deepest heart I know it's true.
My life is sprung bone, dull with reluctance,
longing to be filled in a world in which nothing fills.
And so it begins. I can hear them behind me,
voices borne on the wind at night
in a rustling of birds. The moon is up,
a halo of clarity that thins and thickens
and is sucked out again into the dark
like the ghosts that vanish as I touch them.
THE METAPHYSICS OF WOLVES
1.
The old woman rides the wolf
through the grained scarlets
of the sinking sky.
Wind licks her face,
thrust to a clouded howl,
and her blind eyes rest
on nothing, tongue stretched
in a scratching lurch
to the dark and shearing
blood of night.
2.
No protection, nothing
to keep the blur of wind
from tearing at our bones.
We cross packs of ice
hard and dark as a clot
of blood, backs arched
to knives of fear: ahead
a ragged line of skittered
shadows hunches fanged
in the cut of the field.
3.
Slices of shadow stalk
the sun, withering
in the fraying light
that pulps the weeds to dust.
We leap with the wolves
through the driven grass,
tethered jaws stretched
tight as wire, and string
them up like hunted birds
on the crisp and shredded air.
4.
Bones, wolf bones, shafts
of fire sparking
in the soil, steaming
in the hard beaten rain,
the long sift of ash
coiled in the darkening rain,
the swift bones sawing
through the soil, burned
to white stone in the quaver
and pump of silting rain.
5.
Morning chars the green
and pitted sky,
crumbling to white spines
that crackle like broken glass
under the skin of the red moon.
These things are fibered
vapor: the wolves still stir
in the bone yard, cusped between
their frozen dead and wailing
low in the wind and flame.
6.
There is nothing left to fear,
only thin bands in the sky that strobe
toward a foam of clouds leeching
the new moon, stars sprawled and brittle
as old bones, broken shadows sputtering
like flocks of wolves across the dark grass.
Do you hear them? Those howls,
hurled from nowhere to nowhere,
are the despair of another season
ground to powder under our heels.
7.
Those were the signs
we watched for, in that time
of pity and addled hope, things
that can be named like blood
in the cheeks or marks on bare wood
clawed to a lace work of exhaustion
and sorrow that smothers
the air. The rapture of self
in the shells of these creatures,
the sound of wind in an empty place.
8.
Nothing is plain, stirred
by the gesture of an unseen hand,
discouraged and cold as the dead
no one comes to remember
when the wolf moon rises, sheer
and gray as a shiver of recognition,
beyond the fullness of care and neglect
and the lost reasons of our lives.
Its light tonight is all
that makes the world persist.
9.
The sky clears to a dead bolt
of gray and the promise
of snow cracks like a dry branch
in the wind. The first stars
are out, streaks and pulses
and whorls of light that bite
into the earth. Ah God!
The turmoil of marrow, the singing
of nerves, the bellow of terror
from the depths of our lungs.
10.
The silence of the day falls away
to the low sound of God's name
in the hiss of memory
and old confusions, harnessed
to the shudder of the changing air,
stutter in the redemption of wind
and inwardness of stone.
Listen! The wolves whisper
of life to come quickened
in the depths of profoundest night.
ST. FRANCIS AT ALVERNA
1.
The bells swing back and forth
in the gray towers
and the town's deaf mutes
collapse in the streets.
They are burning the last
remnants of this plague.
The eyes of the bodies
in the market place
are the color of ochre
and melted wax
and take their nourishment
from the passing air.
Blackened bandages flutter
like banners in the wind.
I spin my trail from door to door
roaming blank across
their field of vision,
patient and bloodless, crying out
for forgiveness and redemption.
No one answers.
It is the same everywhere,
the seeds of the thorn bush
that sprouts in the graveyard.
My voice hangs
still and vacant as an echo
above the smoldering flames
and the dust rising
for the day of resurrection
that will never come.
2.
The man with no hands
weaves the day
from motes of dust and shadow.
Hovers on wings
carved from tree roots.
Speaks but does not answer.
Stands wedded to the impotent stars.
Works quickly, without assistance,
pierced by perfidy
and forgetfulness.
Knows which things conceal
the contours of being.
Does not know who I am.
Does not know himself
or the name of God
in the uneasy rasping
of this final hour.
3.
The perfected lie
the word that drones
and drones
inside my head
the clever madness
in this time of confusion and faith
common signs in the limp of night
fixed to allegories of balked desires
uneasy consciousness of absences and gaps
in the pale smoke of each other's signals
the empty shell of language
rattling with the dried peas of forgotten words
the pronouns of intimacy
from the first letter to the last
the mystical contemplation
of the incarnate word
the maze that defines
the monologue of the self
as it swells with envy
in the babble of its cell
all this --
I haunt the streets like distant whistling
I cannot stretch my hand out to stop
4.
The announcement was distorted
by an incidental emotion.
No one listens to the explanation.
I call near the window:
Pay attention!
Remember these signs and blood!
The voice caught in the wind answers:
the scar has whitened,
the stigmatic mark.
Amid the grate of bone
and sift of skin to dust
the blind spot hurtles
into the maw of the future.
MAINE AUBADE
1.
The simple lyrics of waves
and sea flowers stutter
like feathery tufts of light
through darkness brittle
as charred paper. Loose shapes
of birds clip the water,
trolling the banks
of the Kennebunk, and slip
without sound through reeds
pared by the stitch of night.
On this narrow furrow
of shore wedged between
the river and sea, you touch
your fingers to my wrist,
in one cupped hand holding
the pale shells you gathered
to catch the light. The grasses
creak and the moon casts
small circles on the river,
spiking white slivers of water
that hum with the cold
flat voice of the wind.
2.
The tuned gathering of mist
and clouds above water
that cannot hold the tympanic moon
shrouds the horizon like gray gauze.
Waves in the distance break
in a noiseless slide, lines
smoothed to sheets of dark green
oiled by dapples of light
from shore that flash
off the contours of watery foam
ruffled by a wind far out at sea.
Quickened tangles of birches
and scrub pines press forward
in half-relief toward sand
leached to blue shadows
by the curl of the coming tide.
Head down, you stare into the fire
as it reddens the stacked
driftwood and lights your hair,
flames fingering the leaves
of the trees that frame you and moving
like brittle chimes in the wind.
3.
The landscape is suddenly still
as the cramped angle and thin
crack of sky shift blue
along the bend in the river
and flatten to a wedge of yellow
that threads with the current
among the knobbed rocks,
sliding back upon itself
and retreating into shadows
bent as sticks in clear water.
In this place preserved from the sea,
under the worn fingers of trees
thinning to clouds and fog
above the river, you trace
the outline of the dead bird
lit by the moon in the sand,
wing feathers gray as stone,
hissing like the wind hollowed
at dead center, like sagging leaves
fluttering against the scrape of water,
like unmoored things drifting
aimless and shimmering to silence.
4.
The veiled flanks of the river
are flecked with primrose and laurel,
flowers gone to the hard mercy
of wind that skims shoals
thick and black with mussels. The bristle
of water in eddies and pools
thickens an octave to a soft lament
trembling among rocks sour
with the sea's smell curling
in the measured breeze from the east
that brings the first taste of dawn
to birds unwound on the shifting waves.
You stretch strands of eelgrass
across the rocks, arrange pieces
of driftwood softened by water
like a cradle or trap around the tide
pool at your feet, foraging in water
streaked by first light for signs
of life, face pressed against knees
that muffle a voice rising slowly
from your hollows like a small cry
lost between the sea and wind.
5.
Water spreads luminous and thin
across the pale blue bruise
of morning as it shifts to white
in the pulse of reeds ringed
by the crouch of night. The play
of light bursts among the twisted vines
where the sea and river turn to land
and the sting of water hardens
to circles of dark birds strumming
the trees, the shape of something
fragile and small scattered to flight,
trickling through crevices of fog
in the clustered shallows
that mark the end of the season.
Forgotten like a seed cast
on dry sand, your face softens
to a weightless blur mitered
in the scrim of morning by bird song
that floats like mist across the inlet
where water brushes the sky
and touches us, transfigured by light
to counterpoints of silence and wind.
CHRISTOPHER'S DREAM
In a midwinter night of air
muffled hard as wire
and shadows spined across
the bowed back of the moon,
he dreamed of a woman
rising from the dark water,
half-snake slither uncurling
below her delicate head,
mouth whispering his name,
open and feeding. He dreamed
of what she had become, daughter
and wife, in the green crest
of water as it looped around him
in coils like midwinter light
hunching chill over flesh
and bone, of skin and the dry
rubbing coddle of scales bristled
stiff in the wind, the face
nuzzling in darkness, the knowing
tongue and teeth at his throat.
Sleep together in a cleft of rock,
faces touching, hands wound
in darkness where the dream
unfolds its last uncertain hour
in vein, nerve and bone
and shadows surge deeper
into night, savoring the pale
spinning and slow shame
of light that sinks
into darkening water,
the hushed coiling
of bellies and mouths
into rings of cold stone.
Nothing else remains
to be carried away.
No rasp of skin or husk
of blood, no shaft of light
to crop the wind, no sound
or breath to scatter the silence
writhing by the sea.
THE SHADOW OF DEATH
ON THE OPEN WATER
Rows of starfish stiffened
in the sun unfold
from ridge to ridge
with the slow pulsations
of silence and time.
Circles of wind
carry the cold weight
of clouds that thud
across the sky
like dark horses.
Black mouths locked open,
gaunt cormorants the color
of dust and burned weeds
dart through
the ocean's hollow eye.
The finned thing, hiding
its face in the sea's
scored rocks, casts
its silent and odorless
shadow on the open water.
SEEING WYETH'S MCVEY'S BARN
SEVENTEEN YEARS LATER
In this place of memory
beneath a sky full of branches
ringed by the far-off hum
of cicadas, light powders
the quiet weave and dust
of straw. Shadows sprinkled
across the coarse boards
crumble like braids of dirt
tapped from dry roots.
A touch of pale color,
like shadings of brush stroke
or line, trembles above
the sleigh burrowed high
on the brown rafters, spreads
in the still afternoon air
like gray smoke, rising and
fading in the loose darkness
of this New England barn.
Small birds gather in the grass
and the blue jay's song lifts
across the narrow yard.
Your footsteps still echo
on these floorboards where we
danced naked that summer
thinking no one would see,
our bodies dusted with light
that filtered through the thin
barn walls with the sweet
smell of late roses. And though
half our lives have passed,
that afternoon has not left
this place, locked in the warm
smells of barn straw and flowers
and dappling the walls like
bird song or pale dust washed
by a haze of fragile light.
INHERITANCE
In his last days, my grandfather
would tell me to search the sky
for omens in the waning hours
of night, for clouds the shape
of crosses portending war, dispersions
of stars swept like white dust
behind the darkest corner of the moon
auguring illness and death, streaks
of light, oranges and bloody reds,
divining the smoldering contours
of famine in the hours before dawn.
Now, whenever the wind trembles
the house and the clouds
are odd angles black against
the paling sky, I stumble
suddenly from sleep and reach
to open the window, watching
the horizon for signaled changes,
pushing back in absence to the dark
of the room to wait for the whistling
of the wind to stop, the dry echo
of my grandfather's voice in my ear.
FREIGHT TRAINS
For my brothers
There is something reassuring even now
in the sound of a passing train
lifting in the night wind and settling
with the rain against the corners
of the house. It fills the room,
and I remember how still we would lie
late into night in the old green house
on Millard's hill listening for trains
as rain tapped soft and gray across
the latticed shadows of the porch roof.
The freight cars would roll with the clouds
in the distance by Schultz's field, sliding
through the late summer air and whistling sweetly
in towns they passed to up the road.
We found comfort in that, without knowing
where they were going or where they had been,
as if we had found a place screened
from the wind in the dark trees or shaped
by the colors of night as they soften
the edges of things outside the open window.
On those nights now when my children
whisper tenderly in their sleep and I lie
in bed as the wind rises and wanes
listening to freight trains in the distance
roll north up from the yards in New Haven,
I remember you there, so quiet and close,
watching the stars in the trees drift
toward dawn like the lights of summer
that passed the bottom of the hill, their names
the first and last sounds on our journey.
RAKING
In late July, as evening wreathes
the red maple and clouds pass
east thick with orange light,
we rake tiny apples from the grass
that still lies flat with the afternoon's heat,
gathering the hard green fruit
the trees have dropped and rolled
to the small far corners of the yard.
The weight of their branches brings
them close, smelling of summer,
sweet with the rich tastes
of the season that petal the air.
My daughters help with the raking,
playing with the apples piled
in the wooden basket in a weave
of grasses and twigs tangled
as a bird's nest, their faces,
turning every few minutes to watch me,
bright and warm in circles of light
filtering through the midsummer leaves.
And as they played, I raked up
the body of a young bird,
neck folded awkwardly back
against its stiff wings, from beneath
the white pine I planted
in the spring. It was hard
and the color of the ground
and I took it over to the basket,
calling my children away, to lay it
like a spotted apple among
all the other living things
the trees had dropped this year.
And as I placed it in the basket
among the twigs and grasses,
I remembered an earlier season
and another bird, my parents readying
the garden for spring, rakes clicking
against fallen branches, and my sister
catching a robin with
a broken wing under a wooden basket
and how the bird fluttered and died
without a sound late that afternoon
when I brought it pieces of apples
and bread to eat and pushed the edge
of the lifted basket down against
its back, trying to keep it safe
from the things of night when it tried
to hop away, and how birds since then
sing in my sleep, their midnight cries
thick with a sense of death
that awakens to whistles of forgiveness
in the pausings of the wind.
My daughters don't understand
why I tell them to keep away
but will not come closer, as if they know
with some hidden childhood sense
that there are secrets none of us
should know revealed by the things
that lay tangled together in the basket
they have made their plaything.
And though I sometimes find it hard
to say, I know I want to keep them
from the muffled cries and flutterings
of creatures that die in innocence,
the quick turn toward that other light,
the singing in sleep that shapes
the shadows of things gone long before
we would give them up. So in this
raked garden, thirty years later,
I widen the circle, in my children's play
among the dropped apples trying to find
and preserve whatever it is I lost.
MY FATHER'S WINE
After the Lithuanian of Vytautas P. Bloze
My father made wine
and buried it in large bottles
in the orchard soil
and year after year
the wine fermented
among the roots of apple
trees and cherries.
And then he was gone,
taken by them
that spring
with a knock on the door
in the dead of night,
buried far away
by an unnamed road
at the forest's edge.
He could not find his wine
beneath the ground
where they put him.
They would not let us
look for it among
the orchard's roots
and I never felt
its sweetness on my tongue.
But I know
that when we are all together
in the ground
and the light of memory
has changed to something
deep and clear,
we will gather around him
to drink that homemade wine.
My father will lift
the first glass
to all our living and dead,
and the absence
that was ours will touch
and shape that moment
with its sweet last sound,
and our deep thirst
will quicken our resolve
and our desires.
And I know that mine
will be the first head
to spin and that I
will be the first to cry,
to cry that while alive
I never had the chance
to taste my father's wine.
WINTER GEESE
In memory of Thomas Goddard Bergin
The changes of evening
come steadfast as birds
scraping the lake
in the darkness downwind.
A dim chill of light
tilts from the curve of water,
traces a black wave
of geese that lifts past
branches beyond our reach.
Winter comes this way
each year with the birds,
settling across the trees
and hard grass of the late
November hills as the season
turns toward the year's
darkness and softens
the sky to the colors
of weathered wood swollen
with the textures of wind.
Behind the dark windows
of this house,
tuned to the slide
of weather and not sure
of what it is we wait for
in all these long nights
of wind that whistles
through the cracks
of the chimney and repeats
the names of things
that we once were
softly, like some secret
hidden from itself,
I watched as night rippled
toward land in slow circles,
unraveling across the dark
fields to strings of cold rain,
and cried myself to sleep,
remembering in this music
of weather and wind
the empty places and
the dead silence of things
that pass like the circles
made by rain on still water
to the edges of shadows and dreams.
Now, as a thin layer
of frost coats rocks
stung with cold and stains
the roof and walls stitched
with the faint spume
of first light, I listen
in this ebb of time
between sleep and waking
to the whispers
of bitterness and sweet grief
in the folds of the wind,
shaking off again
the deep solitude of night
and the wearying press
of the painful emptiness
of this changing season
that even my remorse
at death could never fill.
Outside, incandescent as ice
in the first blue touch
of sunlight, the wild birds
trill the clear water
to a muffled, familiar sound.
One rises effortlessly
on white wings through
the misting lake grass
and hangs like slow smoke
on the horizon, circling home
to the white hills
in this half-light
like an unexpected sign
of hope plain against
the promised clearing
of this winter's dawn.
NORTH LIGHT
1.
The wind changes, stirring
the gray of early morning.
In the old November garden
lie blackthorn, seed, and spore,
shadows and bird bones
in the brittle north light.
The flecked glow of ice
on dry grass, the fingers of cloud
against the sky, the salt veins
of stones, the deepest roots
in dry weather, in the bursting
and cudgeling light.
2.
There is something beyond
and perishing, crackling
in the bark of the oak and poplar.
A cry lost on the wind.
An old dream of beginnings and
endings in the deepening light.
Things hard and alive.
The silence of beating wings.
The rocks dark and singing.
The sigh and shiver
of wind where the water
meets the north light.
3.
The silence of forgotten things
knocks like the wind
against the moon in November.
Branches in the garden
washed white by the rain
glint in the fading light.
Hours of wind,
dusk in the hollows
where the deep roots crack
in dryness like dead bones
in the sleep and shadow
of the cold north light.
BLOCK ISLAND BLUES
Sunset: jaundiced, the sun
splashed into the sea
ebbing green and gray,
a tide of bilge and backwash
swelling tidal pools
with sewage, silt, and slush.
Dusk: adamant still, we kiss.
In this last light, sitting
on the mud flat beach,
we talk of love. Now night:
high above, circling seagulls
wail for water, for light.
LOVE
After Miroslav Holub
Two thousand cigarettes.
A hundred miles
from wall to wall.
Our lives a vigil
for something whiter
than snow.
Now, words are dry,
like seagull footprints
in the sand,
sweepings, dust.
Bitter, you say,
the world's beginning.
You laugh when I say
how beautiful it was.
VOICE ON AN ANTHILL
The sky is the color of death.
The afternoon
has brought the curling light
that sucks away the breath
before it rusts
the day into night.
The sun no longer lingers.
I dig through the mud
of this rocky mound
with bleeding fingers,
grope, and tear
the callused ground.
I look for life in this hole.
The earth is dark and hollow
where I stand
wrapped in shadows, cold,
a colony of ants
clutched in my hand.
CASSANDRA'S TASK
The air tasted of metal and the sky
was passionless as glass. In that slow
realization of light, as morning
unraveled the fine dust and swept lines
of the moon above my head, I stretched out
my hands and the frozen flowers
in the meadows blossomed, rainbows
in the trees' hanging branches
glowed with the bodies of fragile butterflies,
time drifted like moonrise across wet ice
in a spark and warp of heady smoke.
Wait! I can here them. But I don't think
they pity us. We blend to sorrow and strife
in the wounds and leavings of new birth,
and hunger advances in the wild hour,
and I wait here for my breath to settle,
for the fear to go away as the nagging surge
of needled hearts startled in every direction
probes like braided wire for the parch and peel
of blood. I lay for a long time near the stumps
of the yellowing pines, a patch of fallen white
against the fading green, bristling in flutters
and shivers, and heard their voices
pulling my bones this way and that,
whistling in the caverns behind my eyes
like the climax of some unspeakable hour.
They could not hear me when I cried
that this dream was not enough,
the work of the spirit falling to elegy and ruin,
the way back a lost moment hammered
in secrecy hard as steel in the forge of night.
I am blocked whatever way I turn, in cough
and blind panic. And I know there is nothing
beyond the things I've feared and lived by,
nothing they could find or name, only the darting hiss
and click of the moon's pale blood, slow hunger,
stinging eyes fixed on the grass, stamens
veined and coiling. They don't believe me,
bloodless and apologetic, though all my life
I've named that weariness of the heart
that scatters quickly into the night like dry leaves,
building patterns that long for extinction,
a hundred gray shapes that pass among the trees
like a tide of blind mouths flying off to oblivion.
Root clenching root, blending to hard earth,
the hypothesis of dark desires,
and the life that moved within me
silent now and thick-fingered as roots
sprouting form clods and head holes
stretched and laboring forward, sinews oiled,
tasting stone. I know they didn't pity me
even as the years passed across
the dry-veined sky and clotted hard
among the oaks and pines and lines
of cedar angled thin in the snow.
They don't remember that now
or understand why I need the moon's
pure light above me, high in the hills,
a vacuum into which everything collapses,
stripped to the numbness of bone.
I cannot reach it. I cannot reach it.
Listen! Do you understand I am not
this empty space that splinters to light,
the womb of earth, infinity's blind shore?
I climb only to touch the moon, to reclaim
the thing that once was mine, afraid
that my story has already had its end. Deeper
than the eye can follow, its pale light stiffens
in the mist, plain, placid and clear, and trails off
forever in a welter of silver that glowers
and pierces every shadow. I've heard them say it,
and in my deepest heart I know it's true.
My life is sprung bone, dull with reluctance,
longing to be filled in a world in which nothing fills.
And so it begins. I can hear them behind me,
voices borne on the wind at night
in a rustling of birds. The moon is up,
a halo of clarity that thins and thickens
and is sucked out again into the dark
like the ghosts that vanish as I touch them.
POEM: OLD AGE
The black window,
that vacant eye,
still stares,
and winter nights
enlarge the number
of our hours.
We thought
these days
would last forever.
But tonight
in broken moonlight
your eyes
without warning
are an old man's
rigid and immense.
LITHUANIAN CROSSING
My mother's mother's first lover could not have her
and lay down late one summer night on the railroad
tracks that ran through the fields near her father's house.
They found him there the next morning, the earth gray
and brown beneath him, the neighborhood's dogs trotting
uneasily up and down the dirt road, the wind roaring
without a trace of an echo in the branches overhead.
It was a story I heard from time to time from my
grandfather before he drank himself to death. He would
mumble, too drained of strength to rise, in front of his
wife and anyone who would listen, about how quickly his
life had passed, having poured out, like the blood of that
man on the tracks, in a ceaseless and unending stream.
And my grandmother, with both malice and remorse,
would call her husband by her lost and long-dead lover's
name.
The death he chose was full of misery and shame,
the indelible trace he left on my grandparents' lives as
they drifted apart, wasting away to pain and regret,
beckoned by a memory that would not fade to join him
in the world beyond.
I remembered all three of them when I stood on
those tracks in the middle of those fields near the remains
of my great-grandfather's house, understanding how even
those who perish in obscurity, half a world away, leave
their marks on the faces of those at night who close their
eyes and listen to the silence after the trains in the distance
have passed by.
THE ANGELS OF WINE
He died before my children were born and I tell them
about him sometimes, when I tell our family's stories --
uncle and godfather, raw-boned and visionary, alcoholic
son and failed father, in the end a weak reed no one leaned
upon, who struggled with his gloom and self-loathing and
was caught in a trap he laid for himself in the teeth of the
wind.
He would listen to me in moments of clarity,
drawing a breath as if waiting to speak then letting it out
in a sigh and waiting for me to talk myself out. He would
nod when I said that life is not something that was waiting
for us around the corner but was here and now, and then
would ask me for money for a bottle of sweet wine, too
tired and shaky to invent another lie. It was not for his
thirst, he would say, but because with it everything grew
remote and the stars in the sky began to swim and the
horizon expanded again.
Once he said he thought we gave birth to our death,
like something lifting inside us, like the tunnel where he
thrashed and choked and could not breathe because there
was no light. That's how they found him early one
morning as the sun touched the edges of his room: the
artery in his liver spilling his life out into something
scarlet and black, his nose burrowed between the thighs
of the woman he lived with like a small lost dog looking
for the place he'd come from and where he wanted to
return.
I think of him like that but do not tell my children
the details of his final story: lying in the dark in a pool of
his own blood, not knowing what was rolling over him
as a veil of grayness covered his eyes, perhaps dreaming
one last time of the daughter he had abandoned or the
grandchildren he would never see or the angels that
would come to him with the wine in the dead of night.
HIS FATHER'S SON
It was not until years later, until we remembered the things
he had said, that we could begin to understand the reach
and measure of his death:
He said he had stood on ground where no sun had
ever shined, behind a door that opened onto a night that
was impenetrably black.
He said that shadows sprouted around him like
dark flowers watered by the rain that fell only on barren
soil.
He said that something inside him had gone or
was letting go, like a curl of smoke dissolving in the sky
or a whirlwind roaring in the utter silence that shaped
the deepest truths that were the blight on the heart of his
family and his life.
He said he had groped forlornly inside his head,
searching for the tunnel that would lead him out and
away while the whole world spun around him like the
chamber of his father's gun.
The sound of his death was the flat concussion of a
bullet exploding in the spinning chamber of his father's
gun, the link to the past and future he held clenched
when they found him in his stiffening hand.
His bones are turning white in a place where his
father has never been but knows how to find.
LAST RITES
I wake up in the night with the echo of a dull sound
hanging in the air. She tells me I was shouting in my
sleep, that I woke her. I ask her to tell me what I was
shouting but she turns her back to me and mumbles
something I cannot hear. She wakes me later in the
night, shaking my arm, and tells me again that I was
shouting, summoning up images of empty streets and
abandoned squares.
I sit on the edge of the bed and clasp my arms
around my knees, concentrating on the far wall. The
space on either side remains empty and blank as a ghost
whose lips are perpetually sealed.
I am amazed to wake up in the thin gray light of
day, curled into a ball in a corner of the bed, without the
faintest sense that time has passed.
I am being called into the street, prodded by sticks,
shambling on through the town square, pushed ahead by
a man who grumbles to himself about the heat. He leads
me past three bodies, two men and a young woman, who
were caught in the forests and who now lie crumpled like
refuse dumped in the market square. The wound on my
face is swollen and inflamed and I must breathe through
my mouth if I am to breathe at all. As I pass the bodies,
the others in the square are silent, watching for a look of
surprise or response to the menace of the moment in my
eyes. I am past both, past regret and shame, and whatever
words I am able to mumble through my teeth are heavy
as stones on my tongue. My legs are unsteady and I am
afraid.
My heart is hammering because there is no consoling
grandeur in this spectacle of suffering and death staged
for someone else's amusement or betrayal. They died the way
we will die, holding their hands up to their faces. At night,
when I see them stretched out in the empty street that runs
past the foot of my bed, I try to call out to them, a word of
warning or blind fear. I see the vastness of the sky around
us and the stones of the square beneath, and the sound of
my voice in my ears is the only sound I can hear. I wake
up in the night with its echo hanging in the air. She tells
me that I was shouting in my sleep and that I woke her.
RHAPSODY
We sit on wooden chairs in front of a small raised stage
on which a man sits on a wooden chair in front of us.
He is dressed in a white shirt and dark pants illuminated
by a flat hard light that casts no shadows.
We watch him, with no sense of concern or alarm,
as he begins to burn.
We know it is a question of who can endure this
the longest: we who sit in front of him or he who sits in
front of us, he who burns or we who watch him burn.
We know it is a question of how long we would be
content to watch.
Until the flesh drops from his bones?
Until all such spectacles end in an odd semblance
of triumph and resurrection?
Until the blood no longer beats as hard in our ears
with each new wooden chair arranged and illuminated
on each small stage?
He would not move when the flames began,
saying the moment was his destiny, and later could not.
The first dry bellow finds its way from his throat,
the sound of a body lost and beyond repair.
Some around me shout and laugh.
A PHYSICAL PHENOMENON
Somehow I find myself tangled in white sheets lying at
the feet of a man with sores on his arms. The echo of a
thin moan circles the frayed edges of his body and gathers
in the wisps of his hair. His hand reaches for me and I roll
my arm up in a corner of the sheet and stretch it forward,
afraid to touch his skin. The bones of his hand rub through
the cloth and grate against me and I am wracked in dry
revulsion.
I stand in the tub washing myself, scrubbing away
the touch of that skin and bone, chafing my flesh until
blood begins to appear in pinpricks on my legs and arms.
I tremble in long ripples.
He lies in bed and seems to be sleeping, a long white
bundle with one eye rolled back. I feel my heart grow heavy.
Clean and washed free of the touch I recall half in
memory and half in imagination, I wait for the tremors in
the bed on the other side of the room to subside. I eat and
sleep and am at last content.
I breathe fast and shallow, my belly and arms pocked
by sores and small scabs. Somehow I am dressed in his
clothes and lie tangled in white sheets and moan softly as
someone I do not know stares up at me from the foot of
the bed. I stretch my hand out to touch him.
UNITS OF MEASURE
The man shook his head.
He had survived years in the shadows, behind the
brick and barbed wire, in places where no one died of
natural causes, and then one more year on the frontier,
passing through the intestines of prisons and wars like an
indigestible stone, and now he stands in front of me,
stamping about in wet clothes, his teeth chattering,
shaking his head in response to the questions I pose.
We look at one another. Try as I will, I cannot
make out the feelings his face expresses, make sense of
his gestures, understand the words he mouths.
His fingers are curled into the palms of his hands
in a fist of resentment and animosity, crusted with the
scars of suffering that will exist forever like the frozen
moment of petrified surprise that reddens his eyes.
I turn my face away, try to take no notice, but it
insists.
I have miscalculated his response but follow where
the truth takes me: it tastes like ashes in my mouth.
He stands listening to the growing murmurs out-
side, unsure if the sound is in his ears alone, waiting for
the door through which he is going to leave the world
to kick open.
He is accustomed to the randomness of such attacks,
and his knees do not turn to water at petty degradations,
and he does not reel at the crab-like grip of his heart when
he hears the whistles that call the dogs.
He dreams of such endings, of how to die not how
to live, the jagged rise and fall of time, the cycle of the
seasons, and sees before him the outlines of the rudiments
of freedom against which his spirit for so many years has
battered itself.
His arms flap against his sides like dying fish.
He stops moving and looks past me.
He can endure it all if only he breathes deeply and
keeps still.
He sees it there, out ahead, stiff as a vulture on a
rock, and knows without regret that when the numbness
wears off the pain will begin again.
I cannot bear this any longer, cannot understand
or measure the limits of endurance.
If I cannot save him then let me save myself.
I want to close my lips and never speak again,
sleep the sleep of utter exhaustion that comes with a
senseless plunging of the heart, but turn and ask him if
he wants to sit.
He shakes his head in answer.
THE RIVER
The sky is pure white and the air is still. The dogs drag
back and forth across the grass, whining with eagerness,
kicking up tufts of earth clinging to old roots. The bodies
of the rabbits are lined up neatly in rows on a flat slab of
thin metal, marks made by dirt and the work of the dogs
distinguishing one from the other. I dig a hole on the
banks of the river, shaping a shallow pit in which to bury
the rabbits, forming small neat piles of earth in a circle
around it. When the hole is made, I pick up the slab on
which the rabbits lie and walk slowly back to the hole,
kicking up the dust and tasting the smell of the soil. One
of the rabbits falls off the metal slab and kicks its hind leg
straight out unexpectedly. It lies crumpled and abandoned
on the ground, moving in fits and starts. My heart quickens
as I watch it. I find myself in a pocket of air in which time
stands still. I bend down and lift the rabbit up by the loose
skin of its back and press it close to my chest as I grasp its
head in my right hand and snap its neck. Its spine will
not flex and breaks just above the shoulders. The pocket
of air and time in which I stand fills with the dense smell
of the rabbit as I carry it back to the metal tray. The flies are
there before me, rising in a cloud from the rows of furred
bodies and buzzing impatiently as I wave my arms above
them. They will not follow these creatures into the hole
I've dug along the riverbed. When they are buried, I will
live alone again, awaiting a similar extinction. In the
years to come, when the river rises and roars up in flood,
perhaps it will wash over all of us buried on these banks
and mix our bones together.
ENTERING THE TINY KINGDOM
The cricket under the table in the kitchen tells a story in
a language I have never heard, with a voice muffled as
the cry of someone in the desert drowned in sand and
loud as the tumbling of dust. It is a story about odd
creatures who slide away into the night, who hiss and
rattle in vengeance and threat under rocks and dead holes,
who form the core of a universe of predators in the world's
hidden corners and great flat plains. The cricket tells the
story with a conviction so intense that its voice is thick
with admiration and wonder for the things it cannot
understand and yet describes. It is like a ceremonial of
cleansing, a numbering of visions and signs, a chanting
of the beliefs of generations forged anew each night in
this retelling beneath the dull dark sky. I find it here in
the early hours of the morning, a comfort when I am
unable to sleep, the story it repeats continuously as much
a part of this room as my breathing. I know that all stories
end, that the hours pass in this land and that one and in
all the rest of the world. I face that fact more frequently
now and it is no longer a moment of astonishment or
pain. When the time comes, I want to die in my bed, in
a familiar place, and be mourned by my children and old
friends. The cricket understands this, accepts me into the
weaving it makes of its answers and truths, and I am borne
up like a scrap of paper on the wind and then sink back
calm and free into the dark river of its words.
THE WORD
The word she hurled at me in the kitchen was a nail
driven through my hand into the polished wood of
the table. I can no longer leave this small room. I accept
the limitations of my destiny, express no regrets, voice
no complaints. I fix my gaze on the glass of the window,
watch the whole scene repeat itself as the light outside
changes to the color of gray rags. She tries to pull it out
each night as I sleep bent across the table, but the nail
holds, it holds.
WATCHING
I find my way quickly and quietly up the stairs, making
sure no one sees me enter the room. I put out the light,
turn the deadbolt by the panel of frosted glass to lock the
door, pull it back and forth a few times to be sure it will
not open if tried from the corridor outside, and move to
the window, stepping up on the chair and raising the
blinds just enough so I am able to see over the short gray
wall that frames the facade of the building and have a
clear though hidden view down and across the street.
For a moment I imagine I see her passing by and
touch my hands to my face, sigh hard and flat in the
dark, pay no attention to the obdurate shapes in the
room around me, angle my face closer to the glass,
watch intently for the opening and closing of the door
below.
I am set and ready, tired of telling myself things.
I touch my skin and it is warm. I press against the wall
as the lock of the door below snaps open and she steps
into the late afternoon. I stand unsteady at the window,
exhilaration and trembling mixed together with my fear.
I breathe in once, twice, then hold my breath,
pushing closer to the window. I see her below, looking
up the street, her eyes narrowing to see over the short
rise of the road. I think she watches for me as I watch her.
She does not know that I am watching, my eyes
touching her from behind the darkened windows of this
room as I touch myself. The door rattles suddenly as
someone passes by in the hall. I do not stop what I am
doing, shudder stiffly and call her name.
When it's finished I lean back against the sharp
corner formed by the frame of the window and wall,
watching her move slowly to her bus as it comes to take
her to the place she calls home, things following on from
this beginning to this end, muscles pulling this way and
that and the light that comes obliquely through the blinds
of the window falling indifferent and cold on my skin.
Is it possible that there is an explanation for all
the things I do, some one thing I can find like an odd
stone in the grass I stumble on in the cool of the morning
or the last sure snippet of a dream I wake from unkempt
and surprised as the deepest hours of night recompose
themselves before my eyes? Some single word I under-
stand with a history behind it, something like the slide
of cold scissors on the nape of my neck?
How do I live with this desire, not the pathos of
separation or loss that masquerades as desire but the
single-minded need to capture and possess, even from
behind the windows of a dark room as people try the
door?
I have been through everything with her now
and my throat is dry. When she is out of sight and I can
hear no sound or movement in the corridor, I unlock
the door and move along down the stairs and out into
the street, making sure in all my motions and glances
that those who watch me as I pass by think that this is
an afternoon like any other.
UNDEVELOPED PHOTOGRAPHS
Our son would have been photographed in a garden,
among the fruits and blossoming flowers, light streaming
evenly across the sky, his face luminous with curiosity,
his dark eyes a reflection of the deepest desire I am capable
of. Our son would have been photographed in a garden,
running to you at the edge of the yard as a soft breeze
stirred the leaves and caught and lifted the hem of your
summer dress. Our son would have been photographed
in a garden, and the pictures we would have kept in
albums and desk drawers would surprise us when we
found them and we would say then that this is how life
should be.
Year after year the garden pours forth its seeds,
resurrecting itself, and the things that grow here are
tended with love. As I make my way among them, I
am comforted and at last content to know that our son
would have been photographed with you in a garden.
THE LACE MAKER
These pictures of solitary women in light-filled rooms,
allegories of faith and innocent desire, soft brooding
moments filtered through leaded glass, the dissolved
contours in variegated perspective and composed balance
-- all purity and harmony, the blurred strands of red and
white thread that fall onto the lace maker's table, her face
consecrated with the sanctity of simple pleasures as if life
itself was gathering up to embrace her, the significance of
ordinary things, simple actions treasured as divine gifts,
and the light enters her and she draws breath again, the
breath of truth, obligation, and piety, and in Vermeer's
hands when she is gone this is her life, waiting for the
passage that grows no darker as the days pass, never
moving from that fixed scene to mystery or transcendence,
her soul showing through the flesh, beyond the farthest
void, the distillation and fate of her love, the deep down
stirring of the knowledge a woman alone has.
I think of her when I lie in bed at night and stare
into the dark hole into which I am falling. I wonder if
she is an angel come to show me the way out. She goes
before and I follow, my eyes shut in order to see.
OCTOBER GARDEN
Like all gardeners, I am bound to the patch of dirt I cultivate
and to the seeds I plant, each a universe of labor and each a
point in the tally of the passing days. In the cleared ground
are the remains of neatly tended vegetables and flowers.
The last few tomatoes on the vines in the small plot of
garden alongside are very small and deeply red. Their
leaves are already furling and drooping and the creepers
that shoot out across the ground wind toward the grass
beyond the fence and wither slowly in the cold dry air.
I come here without fail every day, even in the
fading late afternoon light of this closing season, to clear
and turn the soil, to make sure the earth does not grow too
hard to tend as the nights grow colder, as the wind reminds
us that work here for the year is nearly done. Time bears
everything onward and forward in its flow and there is in
fact now little left to do, only to gather stray leaves from
time to time and turn them over into the earth, listen to
the silence that drops across the garden when the wind
in the trees unexpectedly stops, record the changes of the
moon.
It is possible in this way to be both body and spirit,
to know that there will be another summer in which to
try again, another time to be sure the seed does not die
out.
THE THINGS OF THE EYE
My eye is a flower shut tight at the center of a closed circle.
I sit on the bus by the window beside a woman who smells
like falling rain. She talks quietly. I hear the landscape of
rain, the hiss of lamps on street corners dimmed by rain,
the chiming of bells and dreams of glory, the melody of
expectation and promise -- full of movements and pauses --
enlivened and animated by rain. My eye is an insect on
her lithe, white thigh. As it moves, I know that I know
women, and how women are like rain.
INTERIOR WITH FADED COLORS
The light is out and the air is heavy with the smell of
burned candles. The moon is dark and the night outside
is still, though from time to time the wind rattles the
windows and doors to a sound like the crackling of gravel.
In the hour before dawn, the coldest hour, I unroll a long
white cord to mark off the place where I will spend the
remainder of the day, moving backwards slowly on my
hands and knees across the floor, feeling my way from
corner to corner as the sides of my body rub against and
trace the dim shapes of things that have not been dusted
for a long time, faint blurs in the blackness of the
mirrors and windows surrounded by the strands of the
woven cord.
Laying the square requires patience and meticulous
resolve. Although I try to set them right, the corners into
which the cord unfolds itself have different shapes each
time I call them into being and the line, which stretches
out from my hands to the dimensions of an uncertain
expanse, to the four endpoints of the only space I can claim
as my own, an earth I understand, can crumble at the
slightest touch, dissolve in the briefest moment, transfigure
from discipline and geometric order to the chaos of the
deepest recesses in the darkest hole. And so I take my time
to shape this line of cord, forge these four corners, invent
this emerging square, beyond the reach of philosophy or
law, groping my way through a place that grows less
manifest each day, wanting to keep from becoming the
kind of spectacle or luminous display that corrupts the
hearts of the innocent and young.
I am especially careful today, more of a ghost of
myself than ever, understanding with the power of every-
thing I am and feel that every premonition of disaster
can be confirmed or denied, though I know too that
there is no consolation or solace in such knowledge.
Sometimes I think I am approaching the point at which
the corridors I fashion within my square of shifting
corners may lead nowhere and that the foundations I
build of unwinding cord are the obscure traces of a
history lost or long forgotten that I mimic and fulfill. If
this is true, I do not mind and it does not matter. I stretch
the cord into the corners of its square and take my place
inside it. As the wind breaches the walls of the room
and builds to blowing sand and crack of gravel, I turn
my back and dream of night and endure.
FIRST LIGHT
It was the things they sang about that caught my attention
as I opened my eyes that day for the first time:
a face full of earth, deep, impenetrable, restless, in
a room encrusted with beetles and dirt;
toads croaking unexpectedly in the enormous
silence of solitude and cold;
a dog howling as winter startles the dry leaves and
uproots the delicate heads of flowers from the hard rock
of the ground in tiny gray bits and pieces;
the roll of muffled drums trembling in the silence
of the frozen battlefields, the night banging against its
own stars;
a bird, flying low across the line of the horizon,
suddenly erased by snow and wind.
All these things, after a sleepless night broken by
the fall of dawn as it emerges from obscure corners, and
the same voices this morning that persist in my ear.
THE SOUND
The sound that rounds the corner is dry and brittle as old
wood. The dead who lived here are long dead, having
passed through the gates of their bones like vapor, having
lifted away from the flesh that love transfigures to mystery
and sorrow with empty hands. The sound rounding the
corner is the abstract clothing that memories and fears are
made of, elusive as a wisp of smoke, ineffectual as the
flicker of hope in the hearts of prisoners perched on the
brink of the ditch into which their bodies will fall. The
sound is the embrace of longing and regret, the descent
into the sleep of wingless creatures that toss through the
night with one eye open and rise listless and haggard at
the coming of dawn. It is a message that never changes,
and as I listen I don't know who else can hear.
EPIPHANY
Nothing is worse than what we can imagine: the body
stiff with solitude, the face blank and featureless and little
more than a bulge under the skin, the soul a parcel of eggs
hidden in a deep dark corner of an abandoned barn. The
protection of imagining the worst has not protected us.
There is a time and place for everything, and today, quite
unexpectedly, the worst is here.
THE END OF MYTHOLOGY
She could not use the gift of prophecy she was born with
and closed her eyes for hours on end, waking up suddenly
from one formless dream or another stiff and cold, a
human spirit beyond classification, the last of her kind.
It was wasted, she said, on someone like her, who
lived in a place where words could not enter, having
coiled away in inconsistent directions, and from which
the visions she monitored could not emerge.
It was there, she said, that she defended the world
against the beasts that stared from under dead roots and
out of holes, forming their bizarre shapes into answers to
the questions she deciphered among the gestures of
expiation and the genuflections made by those around
her as darkness fell.
She hears them, turning in the direction
of a sudden noise, a steady building roar
in which no single sound can be distinguished,
the stuttered revelations of ecstatic souls.
She keeps her eye fixed on the gates,
hearing nothing but what goes on inside
her, wrapped up in the pulsing of her blood,
watching for the figures that come through
unexpectedly from the farthest void.
She lives a life unmediated by words, apart
from the quarreling of voices, outside the
dominion of ideas, omniscient as dry bones
held together by dust and cobwebs in the
urgent present of the eternal moment.
She understands that the truths we know lie in
inessential acts, in the silences between us, yet
she fails to see the moment at which together
they wax and wane.
THE PRICE OF DANCING GODS
At dawn, before the heat begins in the Sonoran desert,
out beyond the Salt River and the Coconino plateau,
another day of clear skies: the first touch of sun on the
saguaro and prickly pear, on the larkspur, mesquite, and
yucca, on the branches of the creosote bush and salt cedar
along the bends of the Gila, where the spirits of the lost
Hohokam and of their Hopi ancestors guide the hands
of those around me as they scratch subsistence in the dry
dirt. They tell no stories in the summer, afraid of
attracting snakes and early snow, but in winter, seated
with their backs to the walls in warm dark rooms, they
practice their death-talk, passing down the rites of the
Kachinas who gave them the secrets of irrigation and
dry farming in their land of perpetual drought.
The story they told me was a cautionary tale:
One night a young boy and his mother watched
the Kachinas dance. A few days later, when the
children of the pueblos were playing their games
in the desert, a young man walked by and the boy
said to his friends "See that one? I saw him the
other night, when he was dressed as a Kachina
girl. Maybe there are no masked gods at all."
The other children ran home to tell their
grandparents. The elders wanted to know who
had said that and the children pointed the young
boy out.
The old people talked of nothing else.
They made new masks of dangerous monsters
and put them on and went off to find the child
who had questioned the existence of the ancient
gods. His mother had heard they were coming
and had hidden him in the dust of the inner
room of her house and the searchers could not
find him.
They sent word by secret means to the
village of the Kachinas, which stood protected
in a hidden place. The Kachinas arose in anger
and came to look for the boy: the four Exorcists,
the Shalakos, the Whippers, the White Bugaboo,
and the sacred Mudhead clowns beating their
drums of black butterfly wings as they danced
singing all around. They searched the pueblos
from room to room and when they found the
young boy's house his mother could not bear it
and lied and told them he was gone and that
she didn't know where.
The Exorcist Kachinas jumped up onto
the roof. Two faced east and two faced west.
They rotated twice on their heels and made a
whooshing sound as the earth shook to its
foundations. The walls of the house collapsed
suddenly around the dust and the crouching
boy. They dragged him up and out and hit him
fiercely, running around him in circles of rage,
until White Bugaboo seized him by the hair
and cut off his head, throwing it over and
over again high into the air. When it fell back
to earth for the last time, the Mudheads kicked
it all the way back to the Kachina village, where
they dropped it angrily down on an anthill to
dry and wail in the desert wind.
The boy's family, the children he played
with, and all the grandparents of the pueblos
buried his headless body in another place in the
desert, in that way protecting the power and
secrets of the Kachina gods.
They told me that all this is secret and true and that
it happened long ago.
I stood in the sunlight for a long time after that,
outside that place of stories, under the blue November
sky, thinking of the Kachinas and of all the gods who live
in the protection of hidden places and who come out
when the children are asleep and put on their masks and
roam around in the dark rattling the windows and trying
the doors. They walk through the gates of our lives
unchallenged and we respond in gestures and words they
have come to expect.
But in this desert today, in this place of sustained
clarity where the earth contains all the things of the sky,
you can turn your gaze outward, free of the stories told
to frighten children, learning the truths of this world in
everything you see as your eyes meet the horizon.
THE GHOST IN THE KITCHEN
I have not seen the ghosts in this house but have felt them
touch me from time to time, emerging from between the
walls in various rooms and brushing my back lightly with
the tips of their fingers, like a stirring of air on my skin moved
by the flicker of brittle wings. The first time, I turned with a
start, a cornered, uncertain look in my eyes, thinking there
was someone else unexpectedly with me in the house, feeling
suddenly cold; the second not remembering what I had planned
to say if it happened again, the thought eluding me like a wisp
of smoke in the wind; and each time after feeling the first stirrings
of welcome for whatever would come to put an end to thought
and dream, for the moment when the door clicks softly shut
and the ghosts move slowly through the house to put together
the pieces this life has disarranged.
I often write in the kitchen, alone late at night, hunched
over the table with a single hanging lamp above my head
shining down on the paper and glinting, as it moves almost
imperceptibly back and forth, on the ink as it dries. I lay out
the pieces of those pieces, emerging translucent and blind
from the recesses of the page like the ghost who stands
behind me whispering in my ear. I write because the absent
are present when we think of them, groping in memory for
a grief past weeping, for a bridge however makeshift or
temporary across the silence that has fallen between us
in the passing years. Sometimes when the words don't come
and something still presses, nudges inside me, I look up from
the page and down the hall at the chair standing alone in the
dimly-lighted room at the opposite end, and see myself there,
sitting quietly at first and then suddenly dodging from
shadow to shadow, ready to climb up and into the darkest
corner of the farthest wall. Something happens then, though
it is different every time, slow, mysterious, and dense, and
I stare fascinated and afraid, reaching out from inside the wall
to touch the next one in the house who passes by.
But the hour is late and no one comes and once again
I struggle to climb down on my own out of the corner of this wall,
find my way along the hall back to the table in the kitchen. Time
is short and the question here is always the same: who are the
ghosts and who are the presences in our lives; who is inside the
wall bursting to get out and who leans against it, bending it in?
_ _ _
The prose poems included here are selected from
Jonas Zdanys, Lithuanian Crossing (New Haven, CT: The White Birch Press, 1999)
|
Jonas Zdanys was born in New Britain, Connecticut in 1950, a few months after his parents came to the United States from a United Nations camp for Lithuanian refugees. He is a graduate of Yale University and earned a Ph.D. in English literature from the State University of New York. He is the author of more than twenty books, among them nineteen collections of poetry and of translations from the Lithuanian. Poet, poetry translator, and critic, Jonas Zdanys is one of the Lithuanian-American communities' most prolific translators of Lithuanian poetry into English. He has received support for his work from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the International Research and Exchanges Board with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Russian and East European Studies at the Yale University Center for International and Area Studies, and the Lithuanian Ministry of Culture and Education. He has also received prizes and book awards for his own poetry, collections of which have been published in English and in Lithuanian, and for his translations into English of modern Lithuanian poetry and prose. He has taught at Yale University and the State University of New York and serves presently as Chief Academic Officer in the Connecticut Department of Higher Education. He lives in North, Haven Connecticut, with his wife and two daughters. |
