sudden gusts and shifts of snow descending
again over them like night. Hooded,
crouched down close together and sleeted
with snow, they might have resembled
a flock of sheep huddled on the hillside.
Once I saw a work of art lying abandoned
in the hoarfrost and snow of a forest clearing,
Van Gogh’s Starry Night lying frayed among
the stiff and rattling grasses, that deep swirling
blue sky of bursting suns and splitting stars slowly
being buried by pearl on icy pearl of drift.
He could have told them the parable
of the blindness of snow-filled fogs
and white-outs, or the parable of the linking
prisms and patterns of any single flake,
or the parable of the transfiguration
by snow of needles, thorns, and jagged
stones. The breath of his words might
have been seen as a holy ghost of warmth
in the paralysis of that killing cold.
I don’t know if Jesus ever witnessed snow.
It may never have snowed in Galilee,
although it is written that he rose
to heaven in “raiments white as snow.”
WHITEOUT: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF IMPOSSIBILITIES
Anything could appear to me here now,
walking in this obfuscation of snow and fog,
a true blizzard, if the wind were swifter.
Totally veiled, I move on legs I can’t see,
parting endless screens and doorways
of chilling silk and ice-threaded smoke.
A black swan might float before me
at any moment, a hand’s breadth
from my face, emerging suddenly
through this solid alabaster, a swan
so black it’s a mere vacancy of bird,
a perfect absence of itself. I could easily
proceed, entering the fall of its body,
its wings spreading into their own deep
hollows as it vanishes with me.
And it seems altogether probable
that a white wagon hung with ivory
orchids and pale ferns and pulled by white
sea turtles could pass silently
above me, trailing slithers of pellucid
flying fish and ribbon eels twisting
through swells of icy dust.
Many crippled angels attend me here,
hovering on all sides. My breath,
the same color as this storm, floats
through their snow-filled wimples, swirling
their gauzy pantaloons. Coming in and out
of existence as I touch them, they regard me,
holding their muslin canopies over my head,
reciting prayers of blindness. In my vertigo,
I posit these angels now, not as beings,
but as fictions of time creating
the framework of a necessary place.
This dizzy loss, this dizzy loss is the same
loss, the same gain as dancing slowly
nowhere, eyes closed, with a boy I remember,
a boy who draws me closer, taking me in,
as a winter landscape filled with drowning
seas of descending snow takes in
and transfigures all previous boundaries.
Just now a christ with white eyes
touched my face. I felt the drift
of his hand across my forehead, his fingertips
brushing with Braille lightness once
along my cold lips blessing thus aloud
each and every one of his missing bones.
WHAT EXISTENCE
It has its places, in the grains of frigid gray
dust on the moon, in the descent of a barb
of feather lost from a jay, in a rasp of leaf
released by the sky and sinking to winter.
Distinctly present in a stone hand lying open
on rubble, in a clear glass marble embedded
in place of an eye, in the shorn hair of dead
women taken for wigs, it is itself and actual
across hillsides before threatening thunder
begins, in hollow, in cavity, in null,
on the surface of the lake where the heron’s
wavering reflection lay before the heron rose
and disappeared. It is there in the workings
of wind around isolated spires of rock, through
abandoned trestles, picking at the rotted wooden
beams of condemned bridges, there among dry
tares and tarweeds, in any shard of buried
pottery, any crust of insect hull, any fragments
of crushed shell spilled like splinters of bone
thrown for dice on the sand, as the sun’s dark
light in the east at dusk. In the steady haunting
waiting here and now, it is replicated and fact.
TO COME BACK
as an easy wind circumnavigating the land,
spreading slender grasses, their tawny sheaths
and dry bristles bending and swinging
in my wake, or lifting seeds, the keys of white
ash, the cottons of white poplar, carrying
their promises within my boneless presence;
to be a gusty wind in winter, an airy
cloud of resurrection raising the fallen
snow, surging skyward off an open hillside,
a swirling spiral of icy light circulating
within me like blood;
to bring the native fragrances of ripe
orchards, vineyards, and cedar oils,
the fecund damp of mountain rain forests
into the streets of the city, becoming myself
the odors of sweet perfumes, frying meat,
and liquors, the yeast of loaves rising
on their racks, smoke and steam my allies;
to give to the august and muted needles
of the piney woods sounds harmonious,
to release chords of voices inside the spires
of red rock corridors or make visible the art
of light in motion on dew-covered vines
of morning glories, or bestow leaping
pirouettes to languid dust of abandoned roads;
to be an easy wind smoothing the skin
of a lake at dusk, barely touching its radiance,
to pass over those waters as negligibly
as a shadow passes over the eyes, as silently
as the spirit of deliverance passes over each night
without notice, soothing, barely touching,
the hands and brows, the lips of the sleeping;
it could be grand—an eternal breath like the wind,
transcendent and old, to be in death always
ancient in the way the wind is always new.
EDGING DUSK, ARS POETICA
When we meet now, we meet always
at dusk to play. The hard sun soothed,
easing off, is a mere sky of placid sea,
a pale plain of dimming blue and dun.
Even against the forest of walnut,
sassafras, and scrub oak hedging
our court, I can see his silhouette clearly,
as if he were a distinct piece of night
broken away, the sureness and potency
of night taken shape and set before me.
I imagine a greeting.
I serve. He receives. We play.
He’s quick, anticipating me, meeting
each volley squarely. The thonk of the ball
found and sent speeding back and forth
is a smooth, fulfilling pleasure in the body,
as keen, as sweet as the swallow
of warm bread dipped in vinegar oil.
My aim determines his position; his return
predestines mine. I like what I become.
I adore his reckoning. More than once, I want
to jump the net and take him down. Pin
his shoulders. Kiss his face. Our game
is more than memory and prophecy.
Gradually the screen of trees dissolves,
disappears; or else the night expands,
absorbing the spaces inside each vein
and limb; or else the forest and the night
switch names, trade places. I lose sight
of him among the cast of stars.
His return comes from farther
and farther away, the thrust of the ball
sounding more and more of shadow,
its journey back to me a longer
and longer message. I can still judge
his angle, still hear the nuance
of his strategies. I know his study.
I dart forward, swing high,
send the next ball back with all
the might of my several minds, watch,
listen, ready in my stance, wait
for as long it takes.
YOUNG MELCHIOR TAKES THE EVENING AIR
(SPATIAL POSITIONING)
Approaching two handspans from dusk,
he is an infinitesimal fraction of the day
concluding. As he looks west, his shadow
lays a line pointing due east. His spine
is as straight as the walking staff he carries.
He strolls through the center of a grassland,
seed-headed weeds and wild rye swirling
around him in a gold glinting wind. He walks,
as well, within the memory of a circle of fish
he once saw similarly swirling, a living ring
flashing silver in a silver sea.
He is three degrees northwest of madness,
three steps beyond glory, standing alongside
a bank of sunflowers up to their necks
in madness, up to their necks in glory.
He passes through a coordinance
of fragrances: yarrow, nectarine, salt,
a vagueness of myrrh. The presence
of his place is validated by a yellow-headed
blackbird who watches with its one
appropriate eye.
Reflecting an angle of attention, he pauses
as he attunes to the sounds of insects
chirring in the weeds of a rain-filled delve.
For a moment, he is located both inside
and outside his vision of finding that storied
baby hidden in a basket among water-filled
weeds and the sleepy strumming of crickets.
Would he take the infant up in his arms?
He gauges in the same way the spreading
branches of the fig tree calculate. His face
equals the sky he surveys. He enters the night.
He is more than the darkness as it dives away
backward now toward the soundless roar
of the stars appearing from all directions.
BLUE HEAVENS
It could make a person dizzy,
those spinning, circling heavens filled
with knots of stars, swirling blue
stars approaching, blue-shadow stars
fading away. It’s a mayhem of reeling,
a scattering blue dust of star clouds
circling the circling centers of spiraling
galaxies wheeling forever toward no
known horizon.
Someone, immersed
in the deep beauty of these blue celestials,
could get lost while waiting for hands
to deliver perhaps an orange, perhaps
an apple, scarlet or gold, a sprig of green,
a blossom, pink dogwood, spring plum.
Inspired by “Golden Horn” Tondino
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas
THE NEED OF THE BLACK MOON
We feared this most in those days:
the black moon in a white sky.
On waning nights the glossy black
gleam of this moon’s beauty inching
toward the west was a ponderous
pearl too heavy to admire.
During the nights of its fullness,
however, there was no lunacy
in the black moon but a lunar pall
pervading the countryside, touching
every hearth and field, as they say.
Any soul, inevitably so entered,
succumbed to that dearth. Remember
the wearisome wringing then.
And the hooded witch flowers
spawned by this moon in the damp
of midnight were no lilies. White
moths born of their black seeds
were the art of those blossoms,
foreboding their theme.
We feared the endless depth
of the black moon, the impenetrable
entryway to its wide-open tunnel,
the paralyzed swallow of its toothless
mouth. Is it true, an abyss can create
shadows of energy? We often found
dreams in the threat of the black
moon, in the same way as we often
heard voices coming from the empty
sockets of the graveyard skulls.
The black notes of the black moon’s
music penned on parchment were
as vacant as the black dots of the stars
seen in their constellations against
the white night of the black moon
For the comfort of nostalgia, Maestro,
here is a coin. Play again the dirge
we danced to in those days.
NIGHT AND THE CREATION OF GEOGRAPHY
The screeching cries
of the killdeer in the night create
their own narrow channels through the blades
of broken grasses and sharp-edged
dunes lining the shore.
Likewise,
the nightjar’s whistle cuts a passage,
like a stream, across the open desert.
Only the nightjar knows the stars
of that passage, just as the limpkin’s
wail is a direction only the limpkin forges
through the marshlands.
The furrows
of the field cricket’s triplet chirps and shrill
courtship trills transform the sorrels
and doveweeds in the ditch, fashioning
needle ways and grids of space by the run
of their own notes.
And the thin cough-bark
of the bobcat establishes another sparse and arid
stalk among the rocks and brushy land where
it roots and withers.
No one can fully explore
the corridor made through the dark by the coyote’s
jagged shrieks and clacking yaps, those yelping
howls like sheer descending cliffs, a noise
jumbled like rock-filled gulches and gulleys.
None but the coyote.
On icy plains, the snowy
owl occupies the cavern of its own silence,
a cavern formed by its quest for sweet blood
of lemming or hare. Within the polished,
black-and
-white crystals of the freezing
night air, the owl watches from the warm
hollow of its stillness.
AT WORK
The inner eye of the Cat Goddess recites
without pausing the blood verses of foraging
mice written beneath a snow-covered field.
The Basking God of the lyre snake, red-
bellied snake, and blue garter snake
is explaining the coil of the galaxy.
The Upside-Down Creator of the nuthatch
descending the tree headfirst in circles
is willing the sky and toe hooks to hold tight,
and they do. Seers and Soothsayers are casting
lots at midnight to determine which beetle—
the elegant checkered, the nine-spotted
or two-spotted, the willow leaf, whirligig,
or harlequin cabbage—will be Lord Inheritor
of the Following Day. By her shifting, soaring,
rearranging, and scattering wisdom, the Prophet
of Autumn Winds makes visible the art
of the atom. And the Composer of the Sun’s
Radiance is conducting the chords, the keys
and harmonies, of colliding ices and cold celestial
showers, flowing molten lavas and metals
and all migrating herds and tribes. She counts
the measures of the evening rains murmuring
like sleeping birds, numbers each single note
in the shimmering stanzas of Saturn’s rings,
in finger cymbals, temple bells, and carillons,
and—there too—in the cadenza of the white
rose worn behind her ear.
THE EARTH WITHOUT A SPIRITUAL DIMENSION
except for the smallest white button
of mushroom leading the rank-and-file
up the rotting trunk of the oak, except for bulb,
corm, pip, and spore and the passive mien
of the autumn field when the off-kilter
scatter and skyward rattle of grasshoppers
have disappeared and except for the crowd
of acacia thorns pointing toward all destinations
Holy Heathen Rhapsody Page 2