Holy Heathen Rhapsody
Page 1
ALSO BY PATTIANN ROGERS
The Grand Array: Writings on Nature, Science, and Spirit
Wayfare
Firekeeper: Selected Poems, Revised and Expanded
Generations
Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems, 1981–2001
The Dream of the Marsh Wren: Writing as Reciprocal Creation
A Covenant of Seasons
Eating Bread and Honey
Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems
Geocentric
Splitting and Binding
Legendary Performance
The Tattooed Lady in the Garden
The Expectations of Light
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First published in Penguin Books 2013
Copyright © Pattiann Rogers, 2013
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Rogers, Pattiann, 1940–
[Poems. Selections]
Holy Heathen Rhapsody / Pattiann Rogers.
pages cm. — (Penguin Poets)
Poems.
ISBN 978-1-101-62057-1
I. Title.
PS3568.O454H65 2013
811'.54—dc23 2013021082
For my husband, John, my sons, John and Artie, my daughters-in-law, Lisa and Stacey, and my grandsons, John, Abraham, and Moses, for the warmth and comfort of their presence, home and hearth.
CONTENTS
Also by Pattiann Rogers
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
I.
YEARNING WAYS
CO-EVOLUTION: SEDUCTION
HOLY HEATHEN RHAPSODY
II.
SUMMER’S COMPANY (MULTIPLE UNIVERSES)
THE BODY ENTIRE
HAIL, SPIRIT
III.
SCARLATTI SONATA TESTAMENT
THE SNOW OF THINGS
WHITEOUT: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF IMPOSSIBILITIES
IV.
WHAT EXISTENCE
TO COME BACK
EDGING DUSK, ARS POETICA
V.
YOUNG MELCHIOR TAKES THE EVENING AIR
(SPATIAL POSITIONING)
BLUE HEAVENS
THE NEED OF THE BLACK MOON
VI.
NIGHT AND THE CREATION OF GEOGRAPHY
AT WORK
THE EARTH WITHOUT A SPIRITUAL DIMENSION
VII.
PASSAGES
THE STORY HUNT, MISSOURI COUNTRYSIDE, JUNE 2010
THE SEEMING OF THINGS
VIII.
COURTING WITH FINESSE:
MY DOUBLE ORANGE POPPY
ROMANCE
ROCKING AND RESURRECTION
IX.
NEW VOCABULARY
VULNERABLE AND SUSCEPTIBLE
THE BLIND BEGGAR’S DOG
X.
LESS THAN A WHISPER POEM
IN THE SILENCE FOLLOWING
THE DOXOLOGY OF SHADOWS
XI.
SPEAK, RAIN
WITHIN THE EARTH BENEATH US
SIGNIFYING (COMING TO EARTH)
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
PENGUIN POETS
YEARNING WAYS
Some of them are taproots, some
are spreading roots. With the quackgrass,
a sturdy rootstock. I recognize
the maneuvers: buried rhizomes
of beggar weed, long-sleeping seeds
of bitter dock. For canes and reeds,
they are leafy runners.
Their aim is true toward any sun-slit
opening in the multi-storied canopy,
any crack of clay or mortar, through
any ice-broken web across a boulder.
There’s one now, a green squeeze through
the splinter seam in that fence post.
Up, outward, and into the deeps,
goosegrass, witch grass, panic
grass, crowfoot grass and nut grass.
And I’ve felt the keenness of their tactics,
haven’t you? Spurs of bristlegrass,
milk thistle or sow thistle, needles, nettles
of sand bur, hooked spines, barbed
awns, bristly tufts. Blood can be proof.
Straining contrivances all—tangled
mats of knotweed and carpetweed,
swaying airy reach of wild vines (morning
glory, tack weed, grape), bold rankness
of burdock and tarweeds, plus the toadrush
love of slushy muck. Even mossy slime
has its loaded armies.
The slip and slither, the feint, twirl,
snatch, catch and hold. Which one
hasn’t sought, pushed, striven,
probed, beseeched, bemoaned?
I know these ways, all of them,
angelic, obscene.
CO-EVOLUTION: SEDUCTION
1.
Summer, everyday, the flurry-hover
of feeding hermit hummingbirds
and clearwing moths, bee-pause
and butterfly-flutter on shaking petals,
all those tongues lapping, licking,
and probing, the shiver and rub
of furry heads and bodies pushing
into the deepest crevices for nectar,
coming up dripping sugar and powdered
with pollen and off for the next one . . .
2.
Having grown up together, the lesser long-
nosed bat plunges perfectly with its bristly
tongue to sweep the sweetness of the saguaro
blossom. The hawk moth’s tongue delves
its full length to reach exactly the far bottom
end of the comet orchid’s narrow nectary.
Bumblebees with magic keys are everywhere
opening snapdragons with magic locks.
3.
In the early days of our beginnings,
when our first mothers came upon those colors
in the clearings—dawning pearl petals,
warm golds and startling scarlets, seductive
violets and dusky pinks growing in among
the monotonous greens—they were pleased.
Blossom perfumes rose spicy, winsome,
nostalgic with sun-and-moon fragrances.
The people fed, though the flowers were not
food, left them to bloom in the scratched-out
earth. Their seeds, mixed with the others,
were scattered and sown, season after season.
Though fragile, they thrived, all the while
&nbs
p; cultivating deep in the bones of the people
the gentleness of care they required,
invoking in the genes of the people
a new longing for beauty.
The loveliest ones they wove
through the hair; the hardiest they placed
on the breasts; the favorites they enclosed
in the folded fingers of the dead.
4.
One of us could be the night pollinator,
flying with fur-covered wings of skin
north from Mexico over the rocky
slopes and seared bajadas of the deserts,
toward the mad musky fragrance
of the organ pipe cactus, its budding
flowers ripe and swelling in the dark.
The other one could be the blossom,
scented and sedate, the lightest shade
of lavender smooth as white waiting
in the night, ravaged, then graced,
pinioned on the tip of the tallest stem.
HOLY HEATHEN RHAPSODY
As if underwater, she floats and shimmies
slowly upward while the sun warms. She pauses
to sink again through the green and deeper
green garden leaves of this single tree,
its edifice all of Eden, earth and paradise,
slender branches bending and flowing
with the morning currents.
Summer lolls, lingers in its own mazes,
a white-limbed poplar, leafstalks, peel
of scented bark. Her body—seed wing
or feather down, thread slivers of silk—
touches each curled lobe and creviced branch
as she passes, slides underside, overside,
along the ridges and furrows. (Is that a tiny
tongue finding the way?) Love is this sun-
holding tree of lapping leaves, delves,
canopies, a multi-tangled cover.
A spasm of breeze, the tree shivers, each leaf
twisting white flash/green shadow. By will
or wind, she moves stemward toward the steady
trunk, following fissure and tangent, rests
finally folded in a woody niche. Who could
know better? Regard the celestial; the sky
is not shelter.
SUMMER’S COMPANY (MULTIPLE UNIVERSES)
The sun is a total green of light
inside a single mimosa seed riding
inside the sky-green and river-
green of its buoyant pod canoe.
A black tern holds its feet flat
against its body as it wings
through the green skies and currents
of an earth winging through sizzling
star celestials. A ship, a speck
passing by above on the green
undersurface sky of the ocean, has no
notion of the volcanic flow seeping
from a sizzling crack in the earth
miles below, the only line of light
appearing on the ocean floor.
It could be a frond of fern sizzling
and spooling, unfurling its green
wing within the current and wake
of the day, the only frond of fire
appearing on the rain forest floor.
Remember the eye of the tern,
a speck of sky in which rides
for this moment the full wake
of summer and its green currents,
the spool of the sun in its dawning.
It could easily be a shawl of light
placed around a woman’s shoulders
as she rests beneath a mimosa,
unaware of a seed drifting high
above her on the green undersurface
sky of July. See how the green fronds
of the rain unfurl, spooling away
in the ocean’s current. Look again.
A crack appears across the universe
of a buoyant pod. The first throb
of the seed’s green fire is dawning.
THE BODY ENTIRE
Once I saw a field of bluebonnets and fiery
paintbrush so solid with flowers it seemed
to be a surf and sea crests across which a ship
might sail petal by petal like a shadow passing
across an otherwise unbroken evening.
And I was the field, blue crests, stem
fire and surf. I was the shadow ship.
I was the evening passing. Everything
there in those moments was as inseparable
as the rhythm of the sea is inseparable
from the words of an old chanty sung
long ago by seamen inseparable
from a time no one now remembers.
At the shallow edge of a pond, I watched
an underwater nest of floating jelly-pod eggs,
a translucent, swayable heaven holding a thousand
eyes, bold dots of black, all seeing with one
flawless sight, and I was their vision.
I remember flying a summer migration,
each of us the flock indivisible, headed north
to breeding grounds. Paradise: our silver
feathered bodies, hearts and bones, solely
identical, all separate calls one single
sound emphatic. Our open wings were
the wheel and purpose of the sky turning
the earth exactly like the stars do.
That leaf indistinguishable—or that one
or that one, each magnificently anonymous—
is bound as an entire mountainside of autumn
aspen. Each yellow spinning is the piece
and the whole of the standing forest—alone,
unique, synonymous—moving with the Moving
that moves the aspen-altered wind and me.
HAIL, SPIRIT
A weaver, this spider, she plays her eight thin
black legs and their needle nail toes across
the threads faster, more precisely, than a harpist
at concert can pluck the strings in pizzicato.
Although blind at night, she nevertheless
fastens a thread to a branch of chokecherry
on one side of the path, links it to a limb
of shining sumac opposite, latches the scaffold
to ground stone and brace of rooted grasses.
And the structure takes dimension.
Skittering upside down across and around,
she hooks the hooks, knots the widening
spirals, the tightened radii, orbs and hubs,
bridges and bridgeheads. We can never hear
the music she makes as she plucks her silk
strings with all the toes and spurs and tarsal
tufts of her eight legs at once. She performs
the reading of her soul.
Oh, remember how vital her eyes, the eyes
of her gut, eyes of her touch gauging the tension,
her eyes of gravity and balance, of purpose,
steady eyes of reckoning. Don’t miss
the moment when she drops, a quick grasp,
catches, swings forward again. An artiste.
She expands the sky, her completed grid
a gamble, a ploy played on the night. The silk
is still, translucent and aerial, hanging in a glint
of half-moon. The work is her heart strung
on its tethers, ravenous, abiding.
SCARLATTI SONATA TESTAMENT
Listen . . . all white foxes, all white owls, all snowy
silver geese. Attend . . . all casual fi
sh holding on
in the icy beads of a silver current. Snow leopards,
white bears, silver baboons, mottled white mice nosing
at autumn seeds . . . pause in unison, lift your heads.
Still your wings and heed . . . silvery blue moths fluttering
like flakes of moon. Long-haired, spike-horned goats
on precipitous cliffs, white spiderlings floating
mid-cloud . . . take note and remember. Each barb
of every feather, every black-tipped ivory hair, every
luminous scale and fan-like fin, each knuckle of spine
and nail, each red drop at the pith of the marrow,
at the root of all glare and mettle, every breath quiver,
every one, every single one, is beheld and declared.
THE SNOW OF THINGS
I don’t know if Jesus ever walked
in snow, through a storm of snow
blowing icy pieces stinging against
his face, in his eyes, snow melting
and freezing again in his hair until
it hung in stiff cords on his shoulders,
against his forehead. I’ve never seen
him pictured that way.
I don’t know if he ever witnessed snow,
Jesus the Christ wrapped in robes that couldn’t
keep out a winter wind of the mildest kind.
He would have had to swaddle his feet
and sandals in layers of cloth to walk through
the snow of a mountain pass, using his staff
along the narrows of slippery rocky paths.
Once in a May storm, I saw a hummingbird
hovering momentarily outside the window,
caught in a late spring freeze and snow-filled
fog. He was tiny iridescent feathers of green
and rose. He was a flittering bead of living color
taking off against the gray monument of winter.
I wonder if people would have followed
Jesus, climbing a mountain through the snow,
gathering around him there to listen, the wind
screaming its own beatitudes, whipping up