This white silence comes each time
in its own blank moment of awe:
you think, in that instant before
you turn away cursing the climate
to dig out your leaky boots
so you can dig out your car,
before you ask what the odds are
of surviving the afternoon commute,
before you decide to be dutiful
and brave it and your heart sinks
into the grimy slush, you think,
“Oh. Look. Beautiful.”
These sidewalks in their vicious swim converge
in living eyes, join as if by choice
at their appointed sliver of horizon,
as though some master of the renaissance
were at his spattered box of mulled earths
enforcing the relentless laws of light.
But us? We see no diminishment of space,
no stigmatic, scumbled atmosphere,
only vast, disencumbered parallels,
the lucid trigonometry of changeless time.
We bubbled once in that seductive flame;
distracted by the rumors of eternal pain
or everlasting bliss, we measured both
against our crabbed, circumstantial spasms,
our dawns quotidian dreams of paradise,
our evenings, iridescent slicks in the skies,
exhaustive illustrations of irrevocable doom.
While we lived, we lived for further torments,
submerged in parched fevers, soaking chills,
emerged to this innocence you can’t forgive.
You would have recognized us, had you looked,
could now, but we are vacancy itself,
space made vaguely luminous with loss,
the blank surface of a table, silence in a bed,
the thin synaptic echo in the eyeless night
of kindred voice, fingers poised to touch.
We are shimmer in a stranger’s hair,
a bookmark, empty chair, keys, a cup.
One by one we leave you, faithless friends,
to comprehend the winter settled in your blood.
Remember how it was before the fall?
Before the chromosomal sarabande
enchanted the abyssal peace of reachless
with those first grand assertive chords?
Before the first stately cadence rippled
through your drop of sea and bid you dance?
Remember? You were the garden and the tree,
you were the very fruit of paradise.
Was it God or serpent found your hiding place,
tricked you to the chill delirium of time?
No. The peace that passes understanding
isn’t given us to memorize.
We lose the flavor of eternity,
like the taste of pomegranate seeds
we nibbled on a picnic long ago,
familiar but beyond recall, until
we taste again and in the moment know
fruit, birdsong, forest, scent of wine.
So it is with our return to bliss;
we wander off, find ourselves at home.
Strayed to the point of absolute convergence,
we leave you in the wilderness of time,
eyes still averted from the thin line
where earth and sky, past and future meet,
where knowledge disillusions fact, fades
to the fundamental charge and countercharge
from which we sprang, unformed, pure potential
clothed in an exquisite agony of flesh.
Save your tears for wounds worth the salt.
Cry, if you must, for those still to be born.
Or cry for those on the outskirts of the miracle,
for whom our blue-white flash of being
is a slow siege of fevers in bottomless dark,
a constant quarrel in the legions of the blood
for territory no force can hold,
the cells’ most secret, human core.
Cry too for the sequestered, citadel spirits,
bricked in cells of consummate integrity,
safe from any particle which might invade
to dim their one brief moment in the light.
How they flutter
in the brain’s
quaint chambers,
those we loved
before we knew
love for more
than a casual,
affable torment:
as though not
a day had passed;
luminous, ambered,
butterflies
stuck in the brittling
pith of the mind.
As I drive out each morning
in the frantic stop and go,
the faces in the clotted lanes
are flakes of April snow.
Dissolving faces, wary,
eyes elusive, quick, machined
to perfect anonymity
by sheet metal dreams,
melting in a hasty
crawl to labor we despise:
surely something crafty
has descended from the sky
to take us while we slept,
some fine, spiraled dust that fell
to earth like silence or the dusk,
to gnaw us at the cell.
No. Not gamma clouds
or plague, nothing in fact so rare
even as rain, as much
from jungle as under stairs,
more of us than among us,
it filters out from ancient places
in our helices of years, to work
its subtle magic in the face.
*
Taciturn of late, the gods
growl in a bleaker paradise,
their chronic scandals stilled, still
Osiris, Balder, Christ.
In the beginning was the sun,
the stone, moon, water. Demon
voices joined in revelation,
loud with the permutations
of the possible, leaves
shirring the wind, hissing
prophesy or history,
endless intercession.
We cast mathematics
on the constellated void,
net spread far for any vestige,
any semblance of a word.
Between the walls of time
we only rent a narrow room,
space enough to hide an egg,
evade the barber’s broom,
room for the fang of terror
deep in the streaking dawn,
at the naked, elemental hunger
of the
So do not sit so far, Love,
move closer, let the glow
of liquefaction take us,
flakes of April snow.
We live with what comes. Job knew:
no prayer or penance or polemic will do.
When legions of boils deploy to our backs
we sleep on our sides and bear the attack.
And when, inevitably, both sides are shot
we quickly come to realize it’s not
in actual practice more demanding
to have our nightmares while we’re standing.
Before too long, of course, the feet
erupt, and just as we’re getting the feel
of sleeping in corners on our heads,
the scalp starts going in shreds.
And when we’re as sore as we can get
we get the news: it’s all a bet
between old pals over drinks at dinner,
and we have to sleep with the winner.
For almost two years
the sky stared back at us blank,
sent one thin rattle of snow
across the skeletal reservoirs.
We thought it was the end, the Big One,
the firestorm of prophesy
pouring from the cloudless zenith
to perfect creation. We waited.
We watched the corn stunt and burn.
to dreams of grace, to blessed rain.
We set our faces to it, drank,
sent up besotted alleluias
as the world went overnight
impossibly green again, alive.
The rooftree rang with praise,
rang with antiphons pealed
from all the high choirs of the sky.
I hear no alleluias now:
just the unrelenting anthem
of the rain, just the ceaseless
riffle and tick against the glass,
the fluent patter of demented eaves.
I dreamt last night a wooden zoo
sailed out with creatures two by two
for the siren shoals of Ararat.
Will this blessing never pass?
