We are light, we are light, dream the fish
as the water rings out and away.
Since the darkness will flood into me,
I will rise and give birth to myself.
Oh what veils I'll remove as I go!
thinks the moon. She has thrown off her grief
and is able to shine on most nights,
then returns to a river of doubt.
Those below her must travel with care.
They must follow their stream to the end.
They must follow the stream of their listening . . .
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and the grey light is full of invention,
and the soul rides the question, its string
in the musical night. The soul rides
on a frail and invisible thread
or a sound. How it twists in the air!
laughs the moon, looking pale, looking wan.
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A Story of Swans
The young girl's description of swans
is the story of swans that begins,
''As the cool lilies cover the water,
as a mellow sun gilds the wet banks,
the young man and the woman hold hands . . . "
Not the story that, glistening, rises
with algae and mud on her skin,
that is scratched by rough sedges and weeds.
Not the story where mirrors come in,
where a lack of them, in the pond's surface,
keeps wisdom from seeing her face.
Now the serpent, the subtilist creature,
lurks deep in the body of hosts.
I could tell her about the white raven
turned black for its criminal tongue,
for its shrewd and dividing intelligence
and the depth of its throat, like wild space.
How its feathers were too dim to last
in the air of such space. But her swan
is eternal, with calm, dipping suns
and a castle beyond. The rare swan!
When it floats, it floats holding its wings
firmly down. And the fermented gold
of the sun pours a mead on its skin,
on its feathers, those odd, ancient flutes
that will ferry grief out and away
through the qualms of each figure, the myths
of each word that encircles the pond.
Will you enter? The pond is obscure.
There is something about empty space
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the mistake of a hollow that charms her,
that tempts her. She peers into holes,
any hole; a cement crack, a drainpipe.
I watch her. She bends lower. Squats
to consider the back of that throat.
When you lie on your back in the dark
you will hear it come breathing, come breathing,
the fear, not the one you adore.
When your doubts rose, it rose. It had seen
you grow soft, like a powerless swan.
I could tell her about the young prince,
the bold son of the sun king, who begged
to take off in his father's fierce coach
wanting fire of his own. How the horses
who carried the light were confused
and flew higher and higher, afraid.
He fell terribly free of the coach.
He fell flaming and far into water,
and his cousin, who hated the fire
and the heat that devoured his young friend,
spent his long days lamenting near green
and cool waters, near flexible reeds
and sad willows, near bank-blossomed fruits,
searching, searching the ground for a mist
to dissolve in, until he was bent
and just lifting his feet. So the swan
that would always love water, loathe heat,
grew from thisfrom this grieving alone.
I could tell her the story is clear:
That the swan is a flowering grief.
That the swan is a terrible clamor.
Sorrow's face. Or the infinite stretch
of the infinite loss of first pleasure.
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One who knows underneath it is hollow.
One whose wings cover serpents and hosts.
Will you float? Will you circle the pond?
Will you enter the story yourself?
I could tell her beneath the dull waters
where fins, purling muscles, quick gleams
flash the dark, there's the body of dreams.
To be wise is to know many sorrows,
is to know many holes where you stand,
to unearth the dark cry under feathers.
To be wise is to know many fires
pouring over the flesh, the small soul
on its quest. How the quest burns the whole.
And the sun, the high sun, lets it happen,
lets us rise in the rose-colored dawn . . .
but she flies from my shallow reflection.
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God Put the Noose around My Neck
I stood trembling and shy
on a chair of this world,
stood there, poised in between
my own life and loose space.
"Love" the bent shadow of him
adjusting, adjusting,
with purposeful hands
the contraption of threat.
"Love" the tying of knots,
fingers oiled in their skill,
the sharp hinges of elbows
framing dark work,
the tense forearms like hills,
and his breath in the distance,
that sole, vivid warmth.
God the sad, God the ghost,
all bravado and edges
in the place between things.
I could tell he was nervous
when he touched my life tenderly
under the rope,
when he kissed my soft throat
after looping his threat.
While I carefully stood
on a chair of this world
a hair's breadth from loose space.
You'd think God wouldn't do this,
that I'm somehow disgraced
by such wicked imbalance,
by the rope white as bones
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snaking close to my face.
But I saw through his act.
I saw God's human face.
It was bound up in mine
and it needed my willingness.
How far would I go
to uncover my faith,
to discover my life,
the sheer weight of the self?
It was good not to fall.
And he tightened my throat
with the length of his fear,
to the shape of his want,
and he pulled at my soul,
tugged it this way and that
But he couldn't reach through
the tight web of our difference.
He knew this, and wept.
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The Grasshopper
It is a cunning thing:
woven, it would appear, of grass blades
and large as a hand, its hymn
some vast, internal drum.
Antennae waving at the newest sound
it bristles when I approach
as if the wall inside my house
were all in the world
to lean on. I imagine
a soul is like this: driven
to feel narrowed, more acute
in a chosen exterior,
some grumbling carapace.
It waits, pristine as glass,
a wordless, hardened angel
with marble, all-seeing eyes.
How do I catch the spirit
then set it free intact?
Now my jar snags
a recalcitra
nt leg, the insect foams,
flails curious dimensions,
and, when "freed," limps off
grotesque and frivolous
against the grass. Maybe
some liberation lies
in being out of place, out of a home,
movement itself should be a home
where error has a space . . .
but I'll fixate on the gleam.
Am I its host?
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Or does it, green and surly,
unhinge the luminescent world,
this papery self that leaps and leaps
until a broken leg or wing
(mauled by the usual downfall)
looses it from the body
and it can really spring.
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The End of Spring
There is betrayal in such sudden change.
We do not own it, this froth
of heat drowning our efforts,
making us frown at the day's complete,
exhausting utterance. Minute
after rayed minute rains down,
on the sidewalks, in the corners of rooms,
in our throats, and we are too tired
to take the change apart. We give it a name.
Summer, we say. The end of spring.
Flowers like lost grips,
dried and slouched with disappointment.
Birth crawled into a crevice.
Wasps flying through window cracks, withered, enraged.
Last week, something raised its head
and wild winds rolled
from the Blue Ridge to the pine-covered hill
behind my house
downing three pines over it. The broken trees
we chopped and hauled away,
polishing off the initial mess
with carefulness. Every season
shreds the deeply appreciated
flares of the last.
Destruction. Creation.
There is no good way to distinguish
between the two. And our art isn't much different.
We like to pretend
it stands clear, but it's always in flux.
It moves. It falls.
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It is. The weather of the world,
the weather of the mind. It finds us.
The way two goldfinches,
the male with his black angled hood,
the female brownish and earthly,
return to my garden every afternoon.
The way their species,
elusive, yet too well-known,
threaten to flicker my every poem
with the usual cliché,
though I have yet to catch their sublimity.
I promise myself
I won't let them in, but what can I do?
I can't fight the refrain,
what returns to the setting,
returns to the poem,
and does not grow tired of the vast, enduring
background. I'd guess
that is poetry:
not flight, but things coming back
where they're wanted, comfortable
haunts
of detailwhile the rest, the god or goddess,
the uniform reign,
lingers behind, never known
in its entirety,
heavy and gray, burnished and green,
a tapestry so prevalent
we hardly see it,
the monstrous "yes" that does not change
slipping over the hills into our hands,
our feet, our eyes flooded with what
could be peace
in the star-flecked night.
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In the Abstract
Slowly, slowly, slowly,
a red hawk circles the blue sky.
"It is a meaning,"
I could say, or "It is matter,
the form." But that would be
disingenuous.
How a word
soars from us, leaving
the mind open, the mouth empty.
Or, alternately, how it stabs at
the small distinctions
on land, conquering
deep untidiness
shallowly. So my guess,
placid and many-hued,
doubles the blue
distance, which is almost all
slate.
So it falls.
If meaning were flight,
would it be so perfectly honed,
would it be such an instrument
of departure,
such a private chariot
of feather and air?
And what would that meaning
find, the one
we can't touch, clear and sure
of its path?
How it would swath
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through the blue shell
of absence, not even a cry
could reach, not even a cry
on the highest of hills . . .
Oh well. If I
am not careful, the meaning's
lost. Maybe
it is what appears to be
most vulnerable
to loss: a word
and its history, its freight,
the wing that lifts
our eyes to see beyond sight.
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Ambivalence
It is hard to believe
as alive as we are
that on certain afternoons
say this one, with its gray streams of light
into corners of rooms
and its mild open air
and its orthodox cries
from lowest heaventhe soul can wander
to and fro
without knowing what to do,
can be heavy with longing
without longing for,
and the feet can carry the body
across floor after floor
without going anywhere
beyond their own plain action.
Then there is no satisfaction.
Then yearning, in fact,
may be all we can find.
At such times, the heart wants
To draw back? To lie still?
We can't tell.
The flesh holds out its hands,
two lumps of desire,
silver in the fallen light,
tarnished with rifts, portents, years . . .
They can bear no answer.
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The Chant
Why can't I sing myself awake
when darkness falls, when darkness falls,
or bring myself to brightly make
a difference to my dragging soul
since differences, as we've been told,
are those that we ourselves create?
The crickets know a constant beat
in pointed grass and shadowed hill
as silence threatens to repeat,
when darkness falls and fear unfolds.
There they are, hunched and chanting still,
an independent opposite
to all the rings of quiet black.
But I can't simply rise and break