The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by A CLOSER LOOK: Pattiann Rogers
Pattiann Rogers is a poet driven toward both the science of nature and the theologies that arise within it: “Everything I see of heaven, I know by the earth,” she has said. She beautifully joins these personal imperatives
through the music of poetry:
“In poetry, I’m singing. . . . Poetry uses language to create a music borne inside human experiences and emotions. And when the music created by the sounds and ordering of the words matches the thrust of the meanings of the words, then a radiant state of awareness can occur.” Rogers’ immersion in the abundant life that teems around us, of which we are but a part, can suggest that our theologies ought to make more room for our fellow creatures, all of them. And that the primacy of place we accord ourselves, in all our self-regard, carries a whiff of illegitimacy. In the breathtaking “Being Accomplished,” she respects the consequential place in the universe of a mouse and so reveals our common consequentiality: Picture the night pressing inIn “Address: the Archaeans, One Cell Creatures,” she goes further, acknowledging the place and dignity of life right down to the smallest and most ancient, the Archaeans (“more committed than oblivion, / more prolific than stars”): And not one of their trillionsPattiann Rogers is the author of twelve collections of poetry and two collections of essays, including Quickening Fields (Penguin Poets, 2017), The Grand Array (Trinity University Press, 2010), Firekeeper, Selected Poems (Milkweed, 2005), Song of the World Becoming, New and Collected Poems, 1981-2001 (Milkweed Editions, 2001), The Tattooed Lady in the Garden (Wesleyan University Press, 1986). Her awards and honors include two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award in Poetry, Poetry’s Tietjens and Bess Hokin Prizes, the Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, the Strousse Award from Prairie Schooner, and five Pushcart Prizes. Rogers has taught at numerous colleges and universities as well as in high schools and kindergartens. Please see Rod Jellema’s essay on the work of Pattiann Rogers, available from the Current Issue page or here. Learn more about Pattiann Rogers: www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/143296/naming-the-natural-world-5949965655c14
A note from Pattiann Rogers:
The 25 poems I’ve chosen for Innisfree’s Closer Look series are not intended to be a coherent gathering. They are examples of various themes, subjects, and voices that I believe are primary in the body of my work written over the past 35 years. Some of these themes and subjects have received more attention than others. One or two have received virtually no attention at all, especially the poems in Part IV, which have a distinctively different voice and stance. They are collected in my book Legendary Performance, not widely marketed. But perhaps, among the differences in these 25 poems, there is also a subtle continuity of method, an undercurrent of approach to a subject, that binds them and their various themes together. Although I grouped the poems into four parts primarily to create breaks to facilitate the reading, I have attempted to place poems with similar themes together.
I appreciate the opportunity that the Innisfree Poetry Journal has given me to present, through these 25 poems, the contrasts and similarities among the various elements of my work as a whole. I thank Greg McBride for his work on the Journal and those who assist him. The Family Is All There Is Think of those old, enduring connections found in all flesh—the channeling wires and threads, vacuoles, granules, plasma and pods, purple veins, ascending boles and coral sapwood (sugar- and light-filled), those common ligaments, filaments, fibers and canals. Seminal to all kin also is the open mouth—in heart urchin and octopus belly, in catfish, moonfish, forest lily, and rugosa rose, in thirsty magpie, wailing cat cub, barker, yodeler, yawning coati. And there is a pervasive clasping common to the clan—the hard nails of lichen and ivy sucker on the church wall, the bean tendril and the taproot, the bolted coupling of crane flies, the hold of the shearwater on its morning squid, guanine to cytosine, adenine to thymine, fingers around fingers, the grip of the voice on presence, the grasp of the self on place. Remember the same hair on pygmy dormouse and yellow-necked caterpillar, covering red baboon, thistle seed and willow herb? Remember the similar snorts of warthog, walrus, male moose and sumo wrestler? Remember the familiar whinny and shimmer found in river birches, bay mares and bullfrog tadpoles, in children playing at shoulder tag on a summer lawn? The family—weavers, reachers, winders and connivers, pumpers, runners, air and bubble riders, rock-sitters, wave-gliders, wire-wobblers, soothers, flagellators—all brothers, sisters, all there is. Name something else. from Splitting and Binding (Wesleyan U. Press) and In Addition to Faith, Hope and Charity I’m sure there’s a god in favor of drums. Consider their pervasiveness—the thump, thump and slide of waves on a stretched hide of beach, the rising beat and slap of their crests against shore baffles, the rapping of otters cracking molluscs with stones, woodpeckers beak-banging, the beaver’s whack of his tail-paddle, the ape playing the bam of his own chest, the million tickering rolls of rain off the flat-leaves and razor-rims of the forest. And we know the noise of our own inventions—snare and kettle, bongo, conga, big bass, toy tin, timbales, tambourine, tom-tom. But the heart must be the most pervasive drum of all. Imagine hearing all together every tinny snare of every heartbeat in every jumping mouse and harvest mouse, sagebrush vole and least shrew living across the prairie; and add to that cacophony the individual staccato tickings inside all gnatcatchers, kingbirds, kestrels, rock doves, pine warblers crossing, criss-crossing each other in the sky, the sound of their beatings overlapping with the singular hammerings of the hearts of cougar, coyote, weasel, badger, pronghorn, the ponderous bass of the black bear; and on deserts too, all the knackings, the flutterings inside wart snakes, whiptails, racers and sidewinders, earless lizards, cactus owls; plus the clamors undersea, slow booming in the breasts of beluga and bowhead, uniform rappings in a passing school of cod or bib, the thidderings of bat rays and needlefish. Imagine the earth carrying this continuous din, this multifarious festival of pulsing thuds, stutters and drummings, wheeling on and on across the universe. This must be proof of a power existing somewhere definitely in favor of such a racket. from Geocentric (Gibbs Smith Publisher) and The Rites of Passage The inner cell of each frog egg laid today in these still open waters is surrounded by melanin pigment, by a jelly capsule acting as cushion to the falling of the surf, as buffer to the loud crow-calling coming from the cleared forests to the north. At 77 degrees the single cell cleaves in 90 minutes, then cleaves again and in five hours forms the hollow ball of the blastula. In the dark, 18 hours later, even as a shuffle in the grass moves the shadows on the shore and the stripes of the moon on the sand disappear and the sounds of the heron jerk across the lake, the growing blastula turns itself inside out unassisted and becomes a gut. What is the source of the tension instigating next the rudimentary tail and gills, the cobweb of veins? What is the impetus slowly directing the hard-core current right up the scale to that one definite moment when a fold of cells quivers suddenly for the first time and someone says loudly “heart,” born, beating steadily, bearing now in the white water of the moon the instantaneous distinction of being liable to death? Above me, the full moon, round and floating deep in its capsule of sky, never trembles. In ten thousand years it will never involute its white frozen blastula to form a gut, will never by a heart be called born. Think of that part of me wishing tonight to remember the split-second edge before the beginning, to remember by a sudden white involution of sight, by a vision of tension folding itself inside clear open waters, by imitating a manipulation of cells in a moment of distinction, wishing to remember the entire language made during that crossing. from The Expectations of Light (Princeton University Press) and Firekeeper, Selected Poems (Milkweed) Being Accomplished Balancing on her haunches, the mouse can accomplish certain things with her hands. She can pull the hull from a barley seed in paperlike pieces the size of threads. she can turn and turn a crumb to create smaller motes the size of her mouth. She can burrow in sand and grasp one single crystal grain in both of her hands. A quarter of a dried pea can fill her palm. She can hold the earless, eyeless head of her furless baby and push it to her teat. The hollow of its mouth must feel like the invisible confluence sucking continually deep inside a pink flower. And the mouse is almost compelled to see everything. Her hand, held up against the night sky, can scarcely hide Venus or Polaris or even a corner of the crescent moon. It can cover only a fraction of the blue moth’s wing. Its shadow could never mar or blot enough of the evening to matter. Imagine the mouse with her spider-sized hands holding to a branch of dead hawthorn in the middle of the winter field tonight. Picture the night pressing in around those hands, forced, simply by their presence, to fit its great black bulk exactly around every hair and every pinlike nail, forced to outline perfectly every needle-thin bone without crushing one, to carry its immensity right up to the precise boundary of flesh but no farther. Think how the heavy weight of infinity, expanding outward in all directions forever, is forced, nevertheless, to mold itself right here and now to every peculiarity of those appendages. And even the mind, capable of engulfing the night sky, capable of enclosing infinity, capable of surrounding itself inside any contemplation, has been obliged, for this moment, to accommodate the least grasp of that mouse, the dot of her knuckle, the accomplishment of her slightest intent. from The Tattooed Lady in the Garden (Wesleyan University Press) and Firekeeper, Selected Poems (Milkweed Editions) Address: the Archaeans, One Cell Creatures Although most are totally naked and too scant for even the slightest color and although they have no voice that I’ve ever heard for cry or song, they are, nevertheless, more than mirage, more than hallucination, more than falsehood. They have confronted sulfuric boiling black sea bottoms and stayed, held on under ten tons of polar ice, established themselves in dense salts and acids, survived eating metal ions. They are more committed than oblivion, more prolific than stars. Far too ancient for scripture, each one bears in its one cell one text— the first whit of alpha, the first jot of bearing, beneath the riling sun the first nourishing of self. Too lavish for saints, too trifling for baptism, they have existed throughout never gaining girth enough to hold a firm hope of salvation. Too meager in heart for compassion, too lean for tears, less in substance than sacrifice, not one has ever carried a cross anywhere. And not one of their trillions has ever been given a tombstone. I’ve never noticed a lessening of light in the ceasing of any one of them. They are more mutable than mere breathing and vanishing, more mysterious than resurrection, too minimal for death. from Wayfare (Penguin) 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. from Holy Heathen Rhapsody (Penguin/RandomHouse) II The Possible Suffering of a God During Creation It might be continuous—the despair he experiences over the imperfection of the unfinished, the weaving body of the imprisoned moonfish, for instance, whose invisible arms in the mid-waters of the deep sea are not yet free, or the velvet-blue vervain whose grainy tongue will not move to speak, or the ear of the spitting spider still oblivious to sound. It might be pervasive—the anguish he feels over the falling away of everything that the duration of the creation must, of necessity, demand, maybe feeling the break of each and every russet-headed grass collapsing under winter ice or feeling the split of each dried and brittle yellow wing of the sycamore as it falls from the branch. Maybe he winces at each particle-by-particle disintegration of the limestone ledge into the crevasse and the resulting compulsion of the crevasse to rise grain by grain, obliterating itself. And maybe he suffers from the suffering inherent to the transitory, feeling grief himself for the grief of shattered beaches, disembodied bones and claws, twisted squid, piles of ripped and tangled, uprooted turtles and rock crabs and Jonah crabs, sand bugs, seaweed and kelp. How can he stand to comprehend the hard, pitiful unrelenting cycles of coitus, ovipositors, sperm and zygotes, the repeated unions and dissolutions over and over, the constant tenacious burying and covering and hiding and nesting, the furious nurturing of eggs, the bright breaking-forth and the inevitable cold blowing-away? Think of the million million dried stems of decaying dragonflies, the thousand thousand leathery cavities of old toads, the mounds of cows’ teeth, the tufts of torn fur, the contorted eyes, the broken feet, the rank bloated odors, the fecund brown-haired mildews that are the residue of his process. How can he tolerate knowing there is nothing else here on earth as bright and salty as blood spilled in the open? Maybe he wakes periodically at night, wiping away the tears he doesn’t know he has cried in his sleep, not having had time yet to tell himself precisely how it is he must mourn, not having had time yet to elicit from his creation its invention of his own solace. from The Tattooed Lady in the Garden (Wesleyan U. Press) and Firekeeper, Selected Poems (Milkweed Editions) The Process First she gave all that she carried in her arms, setting those trinkets down easily. Then she removed her scarlet sash and gave it for bandage, her scarf for blindfold, her shawl, her handkerchief for shroud. She let her violet kimono slip from her shoulders, giving it too, because it was warm and could surround, enwrap like dusk, and because it held her dark-river, night-swimmer fragrances tight in the deep stitches of its seams. And she cut off her hair, offering its strands for weaving, for pillow, lining, talisman, for solace. She gave her bracelets, the rings from her fingers—those circles of gold jingling like crickets, those loops of silver chiming like spring—and gave her hands as well, her fingers, the way they could particularize. Her feet and their balance, her legs and their stride, she relinquished; and her belly, her thighs, her lap—wide, empty, open as a prairie—her breasts full of sunlight, like peaches and honey, like succor. She gave away her bones—ribcage for scaffold, spine, smaller knuckles for kindling, for sparks, for flame. And what remained—her face, her visage reflective, transparent as sky—she gave and even her word, her name, its echo, until all, everything was given and everything received, and she was no one, gone, nothing, god. from Geocentric (Gibbs Smith Publisher) and Watching the Ancestral Prayers of Venerable Others Lena Higgins, 92, breastless, blind, chewing her gums by the window, is old, but the Great Comet of 1843 is much older than that. Dry land tortoises with their elephantine feet are often very old, but giant sequoias of the western Sierras are generations older than that. The first prayer rattle, made on the savannah of seeds and bones strung together, is old, but the first winged cockroach to appear on earth is hundreds of millions of years older than that. A flowering plant fossil or a mollusk fossil in limy shale is old. Stony meteorites buried beneath polar ice are older than that, and death itself is very, very ancient, but life is certainly older than death. Shadows and silhouettes created by primordial seastorms erupting in crests high above one another occurred eons ago, but the sun and its flaring eruptions existed long before they did. Light from the most distant known quasar seen at this moment tonight is old (should light be said to exist in time), but the moment witnessed just previous is older than that. The compact, pea-drop power of the initial, beginning nothing is surely oldest, but then the intention, with its integrity, must have come before and thus is obviously older than that. Amen. from Song of the World Becoming (Milkweed Editions) and Firekeeper, Selected Poems (Milkweed Editions) Woman Riding a Tiger She sits astride and rides him easily as if traveling this way were what she was born to do. She floats with his motion, she a ship, he the sea. His shoulders and haunches are an easy surf. She needs no reins, no stirrups. Occasionally she grasps the fur of his neck with both hands. Her fingers disappear deep into his pelt, hold to his beat and his current. He moves silently in the way of cats, not seas, like the shadow of a sea moving with light across the day. They travel unnoticed through the boulevards and shops of the cities, the steam and smoke of cooking fires in the camps. Nothing is disturbed by their presence. No blinds close hastily. No child cries out. No one rises. Not even the black monkeys or the guardian birds in the courtyards are bothered Crossing the open clearings, she glances up at the sky where she sees them both reflected in blue like the sea. They are a blue without verge like the sky, without the boundaries of bone or shore, without delineation. The blue of his fur is deeper than the sea. Nothing can infringe upon them. Like time, their journey is the sky in the way the sky is not. She remembers suddenly again the moment when he swallowed her whole, not the memory of violence, not the memory of surrender, not the memory of release, but the memory of totality like the sky. Now she lays her head down on his head. She stretches on her belly the full length of his threshold, becomes his bearing. She sees with his eyes as they enter the blue gates of the prophecy through which their god is passing. from Wayfare (Penguin) Servant, Birthright If god was a cow, I could lead him by a rope through a ring in his nose, hang a bell around his neck, always hear him wherever he was, even alone in the open night. I could feed him and fatten him. I could take him to clover and fields of new grasses, put hay on the snow for him in winter. I could walk him to shelter out of hailstones and thunderstorms, through the smoke of summer fires, past trailing wolves, free him from thorny bramble and cactus patches. If god was a cow, I could slaughter him. I could bludgeon him in the head between the eyes with a hammer, crack his skull, see his brains seeping. I could watch his legs crumple under him as he sank to the ground. I could feel in the shake of the earth, and remember, the weight of him as he fell. I could eat him, drain his blood, cook his blood and spoon it in like soup. I could roast him, savor his flanks and ribs and simmering fat, absorb his fragrances, the perfumes of his waft and smoke. I could skin him and tan his hide and fashion his hide and wear his hide as shoes, as hat, as weskit, be covered by the pelt of god, walk inside of god. I could say, “I know you, god. It was I who named you cow. I have kept you, prepared you, honored you, watched over you. I have borne witness to you. After all, I butchered you with care and skill. I cut you open to the core. I uncovered your parts. I touched all of your parts, your secret parts. I have tasted you, chewed you up, swallowed you, sucked your bones and spit them out, bleached your empty skull and hung it high on my wall. I have wanted you. I have needed you. You have become and forsaken me. In this we must both be satisfied.” from Generations (Penguin) and The Greatest Grandeur Some say it’s in the reptilian dance of the purple-tongued sand goanna, for there the magnificent translation of tenacity into bone and grace occurs. And some declare it to be an expansive desert—solid rust-orange rock like dusk captured on earth in stone— simply for the perfect contrast it provides to the blue-grey ridge of rain in the distant hills. Some claim the harmonics of shifting electron rings to be most rare and some the complex motion of seven sandpipers bisecting the arcs and pitches of come and retreat over the mounting hayfield. Others, for grandeur, choose the terror of lightning peals on prairies or the tall collapsing cathedrals of stormy seas, because there they feel dwarfed and appropriately helpless; others select the serenity of that ceiling/cellar of stars they see at night on placid lakes, because there they feel assured and universally magnanimous. But it is the dark emptiness contained in every next moment that seems to me the most singularly glorious gift, that void which one is free to fill with processions of men bearing burning cedar knots or with parades of blue horses, belled and ribboned and stepping sideways, with tumbling white-faced mimes or companies of black-robed choristers; to fill simply with hammered silver teapots or kiln-dried crockery, tangerine and almond custards, polonaises, polkas, whittling sticks, wailing walls; that space large enough to hold all invented blasphemies and pieties,10,000 definitions of god and more, never fully filled, never. from Geocentric (Gibbs Smith Publisher) and III
The Hummingbird: A SeductionIf I were a female hummingbird perched still and quiet on an upper myrtle branch in the spring afternoon and if you were a male alone in the whole heavens before me, having parted yourself, for me, from cedar top and honeysuckle stem and earth down, your body hovering in midair far away from jewelweed, thistle and bee balm; and if I watched how you fell, plummeting before me, and how you rose again and fell, with such mastery that I believed for a moment you were the sky and the red-marked bird diving inside your circumference was just the physical revelation of the light’s most perfect desire; and if I saw your sweeping and sucking performance of swirling egg and semen in the air, the weaving, twisting vision of red petal and nectar and soaring rump, the rush of your wing in its grand confusion of arcing and splitting created completely out of nothing just for me, then when you came down to me, I would call you my own spinning bloom of ruby sage, my funneling storm of sunlit sperm and pollen, my only breathless piece of scarlet sky, and I would bless the base of each of your feathers and touch the tine of string muscles binding your wings and taste the odor of your glistening oils and hunt the honey in your crimson flare and I would take you and take you and take you deep into any kind of nest you ever wanted. from The Tattooed Lady in the Garden (Wesleyan U. Press) and Firekeeper, Selected Poems (Milkweed Editions) Trinity I wish something slow and gentle and good would happen to me, a patient and prolonged kind of happiness coming in the same way evening comes to a wide-branched sycamore standing in an empty field; each branch, not succumbing, not taken, but feeling its entire existence a willing revolution of cells; even asleep, feeling a decision of gold spreading over its ragged bark and motionless knots of seed, over every naked, vulnerable juncture; each leaf becoming a lavender shell, a stem-deep line of violet turning slowly and carefully to possess exactly the pale and patient color of the sky coming. I wish something that slow and that patient would come to me, maybe like the happiness growing when the lover’s hand, easy on the thigh or easy on the breast, moves like late light moves over the branches of a sycamore, causing a slow revolution of decision in the body; even asleep, feeling the spread of hazy coral and ivory-grey rising through the legs and spine to alter the belief behind the eyes; feeling the slow turn of wave after wave of acquiescence moving from the inner throat to the radiance of a gold belly to a bone center of purple; an easy, slow-turning happiness of possession like that, prolonged. I wish something that gentle and that careful and that patient would come to me. Death might be that way if one knew how to wait for it, if death came easily and slowly, if death were good. from The Tattooed Lady in the Garden (Wesleyan U. Press) and Firekeeper, Selected Poems (Milkweed Editions) Grandmother’s Sister for Emma and EdithThey sit, side by side on the bed, sewing the buttons back on her dress. Each needle slides through each button as easily as a hair of metal light, through the floral cotton print, pulling the threads behind, drawing the round disks tight. After he grabbed her by her housedress, breaking the buttons all the way down the front, he tore the new yellow curtains from the kitchen windows, left by the back, kicking the screen door, wrenching it so the spring bent backward. Side by side, shoulders touching, the dress spread over their knees, they sit together on the bed, gold in the summer dusk, threading, knotting. The curtains, yellow, rickrack-trimmed, torn from their windows, lay on the linoleum; her dress hung open, hose slipping, buttons scattered on the floor, the screen door shuddering. Side by side in the rainforest, surrounded by wild ginger and beadlily, a nurse log rich with licorice ferns and draperies of club moss hanging in the maples over head, they sit together in the day darkness, looping thread with needles like splinters of light, their fingers unburnt by the brilliance. He grabbed the neck of her dress, tearing down and apart, one button striking her cheek. The screen door cracked open with a sharp shot, the spring screaming backward, the curtains collapsed on the linoleum floor. Beside the ocean, a Greek-blue sea, they sew, shoulders touching, the dress spread between them on their knees, its cotton flowers like wings fluttering against the white sky. And in the winter garden, snow caught in each violet crease of sinewy vine, each cross of the lattice, they sit beneath the arbor, their needles glinting like icicles of fire. And in the field, in place, they bend their heads together, their fingers looping, fastening, as the foxtail grasses fall, loop, fasten, rise, the threads knotted, secured. Sitting on the chenille spread, side by side, Moberly, Missouri, 1949, they work together alone before the open window, whispering; the evening star, upon which, they fully realize, they have no need to wish, is just beginning to show. from Quickening Fields (Penguin/Random House) The Moss Method Most lie low, flourishing with damp, harvesting sunlight, no commotion, mosses mouse-silent even through wind and hail, stoic through motors roaring fumes, through fat-clawed bears grubbing. They can soothe the knife-edges of stones with frothy leaf by leaf of gray/green life, and burned-ground mosses cover destruction, charred stumps, trees felled and blackened. Cosmopolitan mosses likewise salve sidewalk cracks, crumbling walls. They root in thin alpine air, on sedentary sand dunes, cling to cliff seeps beneath spilling springs. For rest, they make mats on streamside banks, for pleasure produce silky tufts, wavy brooms of themselves in woodlands for beauty, red roof moss for whim, elf cap, haircap, sphagnum for nurturing. No fossil record of note, no bone history, so lenient they possess only those memories remembered. I believe they could comfort the world with their ministries. That is my hope, even though this world be a jagged rock, even though this rock be an icy berg of blue or a mirage of summer misunderstood (moss balm for misunderstanding), even though this world be blind and awry and adrift, scattering souls like spores through the deep of a starlit sea. from Quickening Fields (Penguin/RandomHouse) The Importance of the Whale in the Field of Iris They would be difficult to tell apart, except that one of them sails as a single body of flowing grey-violet and purple-brown flashes of sun, in and out across the steady sky. And one of them brushes its ruffled flukes and wrinkled sepals constantly against the salt-smooth skin of the other as it swims past, and one of them possesses a radiant indigo moment deep beneath its lidded crux into which the curious might stare. In the early morning sun, however, both are equally colored and silently sung in orange. And both gather and promote white prairie gulls which call and circle and soar about them, diving occasionally to nip the microscopic snails from their brows. and both intuitively perceive the patterns of webs and courseways, the identical blue-glass hairs of connective spiders and blood laced across their crystal skin. If someone may assume that the iris at midnight sways and bends, attempting to focus the North Star exactly at the blue-tinged center of its pale stem, then someone may also imagine how the whale rolls and turns, straining to align inside its narrow eye at midnight, the bright star-point of Polaris. And doesn’t the iris, by its memory of whale, straighten its bladed leaves like rows of baleen open in the sun? And doesn’t the whale, rising to the surface, breathe by the cupped space of the iris it remembers inside its breast? If they hadn’t been found naturally together, who would ever have thought to say: The lunge of the breaching whale is the fragile dream of the spring iris at dawn; the root of the iris is the whale’s hard wish for careful hands finding the earth on their own? It is only by this juxtaposition we can know that someone exceptional, in a moment of abandon, pressing fresh iris to his face in the dark, has taken the whale completely into his heart; that someone of abandon, in an exceptional moment, sitting astride the whale’s great sounding spine, has been taken down into the quiet heart of the iris; that someone imagining a field completely abandoned by iris and whale can then see the absence of an exceptional backbone arching in purple through dark flowers against the evening sky, can see how that union of certainty which only exists by the heart within the whale within the flower rising within the breaching heart within the heart centered within the star-point of the field’s only buoyant heart is so clearly and tragically missing there. from Splitting and Binding (Wesleyan U. Press) and Rolling Naked in the Morning Dew Out among the wet grasses and wild barley-covered meadows, backside, frontside, through the white clover and feather peabush, over spongy tussocks and shaggy-mane mushrooms, the abandoned nests of larks and bobolinks, face to face with vole trails, snail niches, jelly slug eggs; or in a stone-walled garden, level with the stemmed bulbs of orange and scarlet tulips, cricket carcasses, the bent blossoms of sweet william, shoulder over shoulder, leg over leg, clear to the ferny edge of the goldfish pond—some people believe in the rejuvenating powers of this act—naked as a toad in the forest, belly and hips, thighs and ankles drenched in the dew-filled gulches of oak leaves, in the soft fall beneath yellow birches, all of the skin exposed directly to the killy cry of the king bird, the buzzing of grasshopper sparrows, those calls merging with the dawn-red mists of crimson steeplebush, entering the bare body then not merely through the ears but through the skin of every naked person willing every event and potentiality of a damp transforming dawn to enter. Lillie Langtry practiced it, when weather permitted, lying down naked every morning in the dew, with all of her beauty believing the single petal of her white skin could absorb and assume that radiating purity of liquid and light. And I admit to believing myself, without question, in the magical powers of dew on the cheeks and breasts of Lillie Langtry believing devotedly in the magical powers of early morning dew on the skin of her body lolling in purple beds of bird’s-foot violets, pink prairie mimosa. And I believe, without doubt, in the mystery of the healing energy coming from that wholehearted belief in the beneficent results of the good delights of the naked body rolling and rolling through all the silked and sun-filled, dusky-winged, sheathed and sparkled, looped and dizzied effluences of each dawn of the rolling earth. Just consider how the mere idea of it alone has already caused me to sing and sing this whole morning long. from Splitting and Binding (Wesleyan U. Press) and Firekeeper, Selected Poems (Milkweed Editions)
IV Parlor Game on a Snowy Winter Night Albert, standing at the window, began by saying, “False china eggs in a chicken's nest stimulate the hen to lay eggs that are real, and they also occasionally fool weasels.” “Telling the truth to a chicken then” replied Sonia, “must be considered a grievous sin, and deception, in this case, an extraordinary virtue.” “Chickens, brooding on china eggs as well as real ones,” said Cecil, rubbing his chin, “might regard glass eggs as admirably false, but a weasel nosing the nest would consider glass eggs a malevolent tomfoolery and the devil’s own droppings.” “A weasel, testing the reality of eggs, must find glass and albumen equally easy to identify,” continued Albert. “China eggs, whether warm or not,” said Felicia, mocking herself in the mirror, “at least consistently maintain their existence as false eggs.” “Perhaps the true egg, unable to maintain its reality for long, is actually a weak imitation of the eternal nature of the glass egg,” said Albert, drawing his initials on the frosty windowpane. “Someone must investigate how the real image of a false egg in the chicken’s true eye causes the cells of a potential egg to become an actuality,” said Gordon, laying his book on the table. “Can we agree then that the false china egg, a deceptive but actual instigator, is the first true beginning of the chicken yard?” asked Sonia, filling in the last line of the game sheet. Albert, rushing outdoors to discover what the dogs had cornered in the brush beside the barn, found a weasel in the snow with bloody yolk on its whiskers and a broken tooth. from The Tattooed Lady in the Garden (Wesleyan U. Press) and Firekeeper, Selected Poems (Milkweed Editions) Naked Boys on Naked Ponies They ride through invisible hollows and along the indefinite edges of marshy streams, fog swirling up to their ears over beds of sida and flowering spurge. The ponies’ withers become ivory with pollen from the blossoming quince, and the bare legs of the boys are marked by flickertail barley and wild mint. Moisture on the corn cockle along the ridges makes constant suns in their eyes. Galloping through forests and across fields of drying grasses, this is what they create by themselves—spilled ginseng and screeching pipits, dusts rising from the witherod and the wild raisin, an effusion of broken beargrass somersaulting skyward and mouse-ear chickweed kicked high. And beside the river they see themselves on the opposite bank following themselves through water chestnuts and willow oak, and they see themselves threading among the stand of hornbeam in the forest ahead. Watching from the precipice above the canyon at evening, they know the bronze ponies and their riders curving in a line along the ledges below. And at night they see themselves riding upside down across the sky, hair and tails and manes dragging in the grasses among the long horn beetles and burrowing owls. And they see themselves galloping across the prairie turned upside down, hair and tails and manes dragging in the dusty glow of the starry nebulae. They know they are the definite wish of all unexplored spaces to be ponies and boys. I tell you the speed of the ponies depends absolutely on the soaring of the rider squeezing tightly inside each of their skulls. And the wings of the boys depend absolutely on the flight of the ponies galloping across the prairies contained in their bones. and the soaring of the prairies depends absolutely on the wings of the ponies squeezing tightly inside every grass and bone found in the flight of the boys. And who cares where they are going, And who cares if they are real or not, When their ride by itself is that glorious? from Legendary Performance (Ion Books/Raccoon) andThe Well-Wisher from Half-Way Around the World Though everyone knows the well-wisher exists (many have trinkets sent by him to prove it), no one has seen him or heard his name. Like two figures etched on the opposite sides of a silver coin, no one can see himself and the well-wisher at the same moment. Nevertheless the naked boys on their ponies have set out many times to locate the well-wisher, but they simply find themselves on the path between the sugarwoods and the cliffs above the sea or crossing the marble bridge over the River of Rhom or sleeping at the eastern edge of the summer savannah. The well-wisher always lives on the opposite side of wherever they are. Therefore Albert, wading in July among the inlet pools, looking for thorny sea stars and rock-boring urchins tries to remember that it is winter, at the moment, for the well-wisher. And when the shadow of the purple finch flying over the lawn is seen against the bright grass at noon or when the tunnel of light made by Albert’s torch suddenly appears through the black forest at midnight, Sonia is reminded that the well-wisher exists. Sometimes Felicia likes to watch the sunset so long and so carefully that she can still see its glow even after the dimmest star of Andromeda can be found. She wants to see the last moment of the sun’s ending exactly as the well-wisher is witnessing the first instant of its beginning. Cecil, delirious for a week with a late winter fever, believed that he and the day were stretched from horizon to horizon together in two dimensions, that there was no chamber pot, no dog asleep beneath the bed, there being no other side to the bed. Unable to pronounce the words deep or shallow or above or below, his eyes looked neither up nor down. It was only after the arrival of the star-shaped violets sent by the well-wisher and the simultaneous breaking of his fever, that he was able to see inside and outside once more. The blind beggar, who once spent eleven days in the Deeper Caverns, claims that during his last hour beneath the earth when he finally saw nothing of himself but his blindness, he almost touched the well-wisher. Gordon, twirling a coin on the table, believes that death, like the rapid spinning of a flashing silver coin, is the only experience during which the unity of opposite surfaces might finally be perceived. from Legendary Performance (Ion Books/Raccoon) and The Documentation of Absence No one can find Kioka in the winter. Yet Cecil came back from sledding this evening believing it was Kioka’s body he had seen buried in the brown, red-like lines under the ice at the pond. And Felicia, running yesterday morning to the clearing where the snowbirds were squabbling, said the birds were dusting in the warm ashes left from Kioka’s fire. During a February blizzard, Sonia thought she could hear Kioka’s pony stomping and thrashing, screaming as if it were tethered in the sleet in the open field, and she imagined she heard someone on the roof singing the “Song of Lamentation For Tethered Ponies” that Kioka learned from his father. Everyone wonders what it means to be Kioka, alive in the blizzard, taking the fury of the icy wind into his lungs over and over all night, sleeping face to face with the sleet. What will he look like in the spring, having watched the storm thrashing like a tethered pony, having screamed himself like wind tied to the end of a rope? Felicia says icicles are simply the vision of the sun caught on the blade of Kioka’s knife then frozen and multiplied across the northern eaves. That's why she likes to eat them. All day Tuesday Cecil, hiking in the snow, tried to find the hollow tree where he dreamed he saw the naked body of Kioka curled and frozen, covered with the frost of his own breath. Gordon says a dream is definite proof of the physical absence of its subject. Felicia has written on her chalkboard, “Winter comes when Kioka is cold.” Albert, who is tired of telling everyone that native imitators definitely don’t hibernate, found a single red feather this morning lying on the unmarked snow on the south side of the berry hedge. from Legendary Performance from (Ion Books/Raccoon) and Firekeeper, Selected Poems (Milkweed Editions) A Seasonal Tradition Felicia’s music teacher gives a concert for Sonia, Cecil, Albert, Gordon and Felicia and her insane uncle in the front parlor every holiday season. After her traditional repertoire she always plays one piece on her violin in a register so high the music can’t be heard. The silence of the parlor during that piece is almost complete, broken only by the sputter of a candle, a creaking yawn from one of the dogs. Albert admires the entranced look on the music teacher’s face and the curious trembling form of her fingers as she plays. He thinks he can hear the unheard music in the same way he can hear wind among the black strings of the icy willows blowing in the tundra night. He thinks the silence he hears is the same silence found in the eyes of the frogs living below the mud at the bottom of the frozen bays. With tears in her eyes, Felicia says the unheard song reminds her of the cries of unborn rice rats and bog lemmings buried in the winter marsh and the humming of the white hobble bush blossom still in its seed and the trill of the unreal bird discovered in the river trees by the river sun. Watching the violinist swaying in her velvet gown, closing her eyes, pursing her lips, Cecil knows Sonia is the only possible theme of this composition. Hoping for a cure for Felicia’s uncle, Sonia thinks the inaudible music might be the unspoken speech in which he is thought to have lost himself years ago. At the conclusion of the piece (signaled by the lowering of the violin) there is always spontaneous applause and much barking and leaping by the dogs. The unheard composition is the one song most discussed later over tea and pastries, and, although it was the subject of the quarrel during which Cecil knocked Albert’s doughnut from his hand last year, it is still generally considered the evening’s greatest success. from Legendary Performance (Ion Books/Raccoon) and The Love of Enchantment: Felicia Was Kissed in the Garden Last Night Someone unseen behind her in the sage and iris odors of the gravel pathway definitely took her by the shoulders, pushed her hair aside carefully and kissed her with decision and concern just once, there at the darkness below her ear. And there was breath in that kiss as if the hesitation and impetuosity of spring together had finally found one motion. And there was love in that motion as when the parting and reconciliation inside a hawthorn seed finally divine together a branch full of blossoms. And now, by her belief in the imagined spell created by that kiss, Felicia clearly perceives the means by which the earth can be taut with Indian pipe, heavy with matted roots of salt marshes, dark with redwood shadows, while at the same moment it can soar, clean and shining, a white grain sailing in the black heavens around the sun. A new resiliency has risen in Felicia’s bones since her encounter in the garden, a warm and dominant, marrow-related alloy sustained by her spine remembering those fingertips brushing her shoulders with praise. Everyone recognizes the new buoyancy of esteem in the charmed energy and sureness of her body swimming across the lily-bordered lake this evening. Now even Gordon wants to see and touch that small exalted, transfigured, lip-defined, miraculous moment of her neck. And no one is sorry that, even if just once, Felicia was kissed and cherished that way in an ordinary garden rightly declared, rightly proclaimed, justifiably announced by Felicia, running to clasp both of Albert’s hands in her own, as grandly enchanted last night. from Legendary Performance (Ion Books/Raccoon) and Immemorial when Kioka lifted the flap and ran out the door of his sweat bath tipi headed toward the glacial melt his steamy naked body dripping he ran right through the perfect oval moment of the day right through the first loop of the night-to-come right through the first spreading ring of his own shouting and kept on going dancing through all the horizon’s spinning hoops in and out every secondary hue of his own nature emerging from the violet hallway a shade of iris emerging from the crimson corridor sun-red emerging from the sapphire sheath a bean-pod green his face pressed forward his hair flying he pushed beyond the five unlatched doorways of his name sprinted through the bull’s eye of his own pointed finger raced through the needle-eye of his grandmother’s mettle through the last strategic spyhole cut by his grandfather passing through the circle of his linked arms passing through the gate of his own “amen” down the spiralling tunnel of his sex through the open mouth of his own death he dove finally straight into the depths of that icy pool only to rise out of the stillness again shooting above the water waving and cursing and blowing fiercely and it’s a fact nobody can run like Kioka can. from Geocentric (Gibbs Smith Publisher) and Firekeeper, Selected Poems (Milkweed Editions) Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |
