she’s pulled fetid strings
of maggot-infested flesh
from abandoned hides;
once existed for a month
on the putrid marrow
from a wild boar’s corpse.
She’s lived in even leaner
times, leaping and munching
on lizards, grasshoppers,
and grubs.
Her eyes have seen the evening
sun setting on the Serengeti
from inside the boney cavern
of a fallen wildebeest.
She’s called with others
beside a kill, yelped, howled
for murder’s sake in chorus
all night long on the starless
grass sky of the savannah.
Forager, tenacious scrounger,
scarred, crippled
by the hooves of kicking
gazelles, she knows
better than anyone else
what kind of god it was
who left the pure white bone
of the moon picked so clean.
With scab worms and billy-club knots
on her rear, she’s here—Thief, Felon,
Mongrel Messiah—beside the blind
beggar for good.
And now when his sustaining
visions of bonfires over water
come only dimly and rarely
when his fingertips harden, tough
and numb as leather and his beseeching
talents fail, when all sighted
angels face in the opposite
direction and there is no one
in that dark and frightening
paucity who sees
that he does not see,
then with his hand on her head,
she can lead him down these alleys
in the way he has to go.
LESS THAN A WHISPER POEM
no sound above a nod,
nothing louder than one wilted
thread of sunflower gold dropping
to a lower leaf
nothing more jarring
than the transparent slide of a raindrop
slicking down the furrow of a mossy
trunk
slightly less audible than the dip
and rock of a kite string lost and snagged
on a limb of oak
no message
more profound than December edging
stiffly through the ice-blue branches
of the solstice
nothing more riotous
than a cold lump of toad watching
like a stone for a wing of diaphanous
light to pass,
as still as a possum’s feint
no message more profane than
three straws of frost-covered grass leaning
together on an empty dune
a quiet more
silent than a locked sacristy at midnight,
more vacant than the void of a secret
rune lost at sea
no sound, not even
a sigh the width of one scale of a white
moth’s wing, not even a hush the length
of a candle’s blink
nothing,
even less than an imagined finger held
to imagined lips
IN THE SILENCE FOLLOWING
After a freight train lumbers by,
hissing steam and grumbling curses,
metal screeching against metal, it passes
into the night (which is the empty
shadow of the earth), becoming soft
clinking spurs, a breathy whistle, low
bells clanking like tangled chains,
disappearing as if on lambskin wheels.
Something lingers then in the silence,
a reality I can’t name. It remains as near
to a ghost as the thought of a ghost
can be, hovering like a dry leaf spirit
motionless in a hardwood forest absent
of wind, inexplicably heraldic. It is closest
to the cry of a word I should know
by never having heard it.
What hesitates in that silence possesses
the same shape as the moment coming
just after the lamp is extinguished
but before the patterned moonlight
on the rug and the window-squares
of moonlight on the wall opposite
become evident. That shift of light
and apprehension is a form I should know
by having so readily recognized it.
After the yelping dog is chastened
and a door slams shut on the winter evening
filled with snow and its illuminations,
someone standing outside in the silence
following might sense not an echo
or a reflection but the single defining
feature of that disappearance
permeating the frigid air.
When all the strings and wires of the piano’s
final chord are stilled and soundless, the hands
just beginning to lift from the keys, when the last
declaration of the last crow swinging down
into the broken stalks of the corn field ceases,
when the river, roaring, bucking, and battering
in its charge across the land, calms its frothy
madness back to bed at last, then suspended
in the space of silence afterward, may be
a promise, may be a ruse.
THE DOXOLOGY OF SHADOWS
They float and sweep. They flicker
and unfold, having neither electrons
nor atoms, neither grasp nor escape.
Like skeletons, they could be
scaffolds. They are visible echoes.
Like scaffolds, they could be memory.
When of cattails and limber willows
on a summer pond, they are reverie.
Layering each other in a windy
forest, they can cover and disfigure
a face to a puzzle of shifting pieces.
If straight and unwavering when
crossing grassy lawns and clearings,
they are measures of time, true
of direction. The shadows
of minnows on the creek bed below
are either darting ripples of black
sun over the sand or reverse reflections
of surge as fish, design as soul.
They bring the devices and edicts
of winter, of spring, into the house,
over walls, ceilings, staircases—
the inside motion of a blossom falling
outside, a bird beyond the window
swooping a passage of pure flight
through the room. Shadow-drops
pearl over sofa, table, books, replicating
rain lingering in gold among leaves
and branches at dusk.
I sit on the floor within the shadow
network of a winter elm, its architecture
spread across the rug. The substance
of this structure is less than the bones
of a bumblebee bat, yet it holds me.
Some shadows are much esteemed,
those of canopies, awnings, and parasols.
Many ancient tales record sightings
of ostriches seeking the black relief
of cloud shadows on the savannah,
following them across the treeless plains
like magi following the holy star.
Maybe the metals o
f meteors, the drifting
remnants of galactic debris, the ices
and gravels of disintegrating comets
in their orbits cast showers of tiny pale
shadows (like spells or blessings or praises
upon us) as they pass between sun and earth.
With no fragrance—neither spicy, sweet,
acrid, nor mellow—without sighs or summaries,
without an aim of their own, like wraiths
and ghosts with no heft of any kind—the sole
matter of shadows is lack. Disappearing
in darkness, they depend for their being
on light. Therefore, they cannot be evil.
Some people still do not believe.
SPEAK, RAIN
Sound with the cries of Rachel’s children.
Moan over empty hillsides and river runnels,
among the broken stones of abandoned streets
and fallen fences, through empty channels
and sharp-ledged ravines resonant with echo.
Rasp and rattle with the integrity of a perfect
reckoning down the metal roof onto the splash
pans of gutters, down the pipes of open sewers.
Snore skywide with sporadic mumbles.
Rumble from your own soul sources.
Stutter erudite nonsense, a stentorian
preaching from high altars, pellets clicking
and tapping among the leathery leaves
of oak and hickory in the upper towers
of the kingly forest.
Is that the giggling of lost Peter and Aaron
pattering on the cold lake’s surface?
Speak, an eloquence devoid of message
in the silence of floating fog. I’m listening,
the voice sinking among the invisible
blades of the morning marsh.
Tarry awhile in the dark, humming the sleep
and lullaby common to that far place
from which you have come.
In retreat, challenge slowly in single words
striking randomly: now, and now, now,
now and now.
In the dust, spit large rounded vowels.
WITHIN THE EARTH BENEATH US
Our Father, who is the Passageway in the tunnel
of the worm and the trench of the mole,
in the wintering eggs of the luminous beetle
and the ragged reachings of all roots scraggly
and crooked with the network of their knitted
inroads, who is the Deep in unseen subterranean
rivers, the Porous of limestone, sandstone,
and gravel through which groundwater seeps
to purity downward, the Sunless in buried aquifers,
and the overpowering Weakness in the single cell
enormities surmounting there, who is the Source
and Savior of the eyeless eel and the eyeless
pseudoscorpion and is the Blindness of the eyeless
eel and the eyeless pseudoscorpion, and the rigid
Seriousness of ancient cave chambers, echoing
caverns, and catacombs, damp stone spires
and walls of granite organs, the Light of calcite
pinnacles which, after touched by sudden light
in their lasting darkness, emit light themselves,
dimly, briefly, who is the seething core Intensity
of molten metals, the center Clench of solid
iron/nickel fury, who is the complete Circumference,
each and every inner Radius of orbital earth,
hallowed and empirical, who is the Story
and is the Telling and is the Silence beyond
forever. Amen.
SIGNIFYING (COMING TO EARTH)
Rain comes in its minions, streaming
down into ravines and rimples, running
over and under bedrock and boulders,
down the slopes of gulleys, sopping
mossy dells and frond-filled valleys.
And snow, without blizzard, colorless
with silence, floats to earth, gathering
across plains and lowland forests, covering
the smallest flat pads of weathered
mushrooms, filling the upturned hulls
of spent pods—yucca, locust, pea, mimosa.
All of these seek the earth.
Spiders drop too, sometimes sailing
in hatchling clusters, gliding through
a still day on streamers or blown
sideways over fallow fields until
the wind ceases and they settle
in the bristled grasses and mayweeds.
Whispy seeds of ash and maple aim
for it, each balanced with the wind on double
paper wings. Every direction points
finally toward earth. Acorns, walnuts,
hickories split away, plummet hard,
knocking through tangled twigs
and branches to get here.
And geese zero in, whiffling and skidding
feet first to a lake-slide landing, skimming
in praising sprays of water. Watch.
The earth is so desired. Coming
as close to it as possible, consumed by it,
white toads and blind fish adore the deep
of its internal damp, foregoing color for it,
relinquishing sight. The inert seek it too,
bone splinters, fleshy crumbs, nasty orts
and roughages sink through sea currents
all the way down to its bottom sunless bed.
The heavenly—angels, arch-angels—
deliberately descend, perching and hovering.
Their choruses sound then like broken chords
of wind strumming through pinyon pines,
like the dodecahedron ring of icy chimes
hanging in crystals from winter eaves.
With all the vast freedom and void
of the universe to select from, frigid evil
comes too, seeking warmth in the belly
of the lover, power in the birthright of the sea,
spring light in the pulse of the prairie.
The earth is so desired. How its rock
and river body is loved, its dune and hillock,
its night and day demeanor. Even the dead—gone,
buried, and forgotten—take its name forever.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
With thanks for the tenacious and devoted work of the editors of the following journals in which the poems listed were first published, and thanks to the editors of all such journals and magazines that provide venues for the publication of poetry.
American Scientist: “Holy Heathen Rhapsody”
ARTline: “Blue Heavens”
Ecotone: “Co-evolution: Seduction”; “Summer’s Company (Multiple Universes)”
Field: “Scarlatti Sonata Testament”
Georgia Review: “At Work”; “Night and the Creation of Geography”; “Yearning Ways”
Image: “Hail, Spirit”; “Speak, Rain”
The Iowa Review: “Edging Dusk, Ars Poetica”; “In the Silence Following”; “Less Than a Whisper Poem”
Literature and Belief: “The Snow of Things”; “What Existence”
New Mexico Poetry Review: “The Earth Without a Spiritual Dimension”
Orion: “Romance”
Poetry International: “The Doxology of Shadows”
World Literature Today: “Signifying (Coming to Earth)”; “The Body Entire”
My thanks to the editors of the following chapbooks in which certain poems in this book appeared: Lies and Devotions (Tangram Press) and Summer’s Compa
ny (Brooding Heron Press).
I’m extremely grateful to Paul Slovak for his kindness, his efficient editing, and his insightful and helpful comments on my manuscript.
PHOTO BY JOHN R. ROGERS
Pattiann Rogers has published eleven books of poetry and two collections of essays. Her most recent books are The Grand Array: Writings on Nature, Science, and Spirit (Trinity University Press, 2010) and Wayfare (Penguin, 2008). Song of the World Becoming: New and Collected Poems 1981–2001 (Milkweed Editions) was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and an Editor’s Choice in Booklist. Firekeeper: New and Selected Poems was a finalist for the Lenore Marshall Award and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1994. Rogers is the recipient of two NEA Grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a 2005 Literary Award in Poetry from the Lannan Foundation. Her poems have won three prizes from Poetry, the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, two Strousse Awards from Prairie Schooner, and five Pushcart Prizes. Her work has appeared in Best American Poetry in 1996 and 2009, and in Best Spiritual Writing, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, and 2010. Rogers’s papers are archived in the Sowell Family Collection of Literature, Community, and the Natural World at Texas Tech University. She has been a visiting writer at numerous universities and colleges and was an associate professor at the University of Arkansas from 1993–97. She is the mother of two sons and has three grandsons. She lives with her husband, a retired geophysicist, in Colorado.
PENGUIN POETS
JOHN ASHBERY
Selected Poems
Self-Portrait in a Covex Mirror
TED BERRIGAN
The Sonnets
LAUREN BERRY
The Lifting Dress
JOE BONOMO
Installations
PHILIP BOOTH
Selves
JULIANNE BUCHSBAUM
The Apothecary's Heir
JIM CARROLL
Fear and Dreaming: The Seclected Poems
Living at the Movies
Void of Course
ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING
Genius Loci
Rope
CARL DENNIS
Holy Heathen Rhapsody Page 4