The Innisfree Poetry Journal www.innisfreepoetry.org by Marc Harshman FOUR MOVEMENTS AFTER CARL RUGGLES 1 Mountains, large mountains, and black. Mountains upon mountains stretching back large against sky, clouds of mountains, of shadows, reaching and turning again and again back upon themselves, black tumbles of rock higher and higher in a thin, last sliver of rainy light, darkening in night. 2 The sky so filled with rock, black, shadow so much mountain the sky barely squeezes through, and where it does, torn with wind, the clouds stream in ragged tatters. 3 Talk as if you know, as if you know anything about anything, as if time and facts could manage it, could assemble back the black faces of those crags, spill as large as they were the clouds of them out here, as if they were words, their shadows, the tumbled reach of horizon they dominated, the silver plate of sky riven with tracings, as if a language were there to be understood, believed. 4 Had I not been small once and tucked into darkness once a day, week after week, once upon a time? Had I not seen dark mount the bedroom walls larger than the space between all I knew, a sky high with lightlessness, and know then that this would be a part of me, and nothing to do with fear this, that place before, where the repetition of nights upon night practiced a way back into the welcome dark. Enough, then, to know nightfall as a house of comfort, full of clear views, vistas where mountains reached beyond black, spilled rocks into gaps strewn with shadows, cracked and torn, and clouds raced with silver and finally, further, a pale, thin horizon stood through which might return the dreams that perpetuate believing in such things as these endlessly. PIETÀ These fragile leaves give the best light, silent torches of gold frost lighting the setting dusk-light. Off and below the curve of the hill the poplars rise to meet her. She comes to see them, their incendiary fall, their passage as certain as that one of his who was her own. She comes each day to learn at this place, where the hollow cleaves the hill, to learn by heart her remembering of where in the slow, burning light they, these old poplars on this old ground, where they go. She would follow as far as Hamlin stone into its dark hold of lives if death's piping would show her reason, would follow now into this wood, under these poplars, their slow fire, go into the rain, go in this cold into the heart of what's lost too soon, too early to rise, to come again quick and light. She would go to find if under these leaves, their last light, there was something, some clue could give back the path her life led before, could return its light, its comfort. But what light there is fades, lifts tall, regular shadows returning to her only the weather, the season, the minutes, the wind a drench of fog, the road a lash of distances, the earth a maze of hills, and there, in those hills, their ancient stone, will be the only succor, their time alone long enough for forgetting and remembering, for remembering the way the leaves were golden mirrors the evening the news came, for remembering as she must, as she did then, the quality of stone, its holdfast against life, herself, remembering to return, make the fire, make, in its gentle shadows, over stone a light, a meal, and afterwards reach toward sleep, remembering in the cold room to pull the comforts to her chin, the quilted swirl of crazy pieces, their twining branches of cloth like a twining tracery of leaves, these few leaves at the last the only light, a glimmer vouchsafed of the last light. THE OPEN BORDERS At first any chance would have done, I'd have taken any, a dance, a movie, some old friend to plant the words between us, any that might have filled the air already heavy with summer, and tense, words to erase inhibition, extend boundaries, syllables to translate what was, could be so sweet . . . crazy it was what you could do to me there upon that foreign land of yours, your fingers, the small buttons of them opening and closing upon me, your lips, the smell of your hair . . . couldn't it have been easy, come easy, those words I wanted to come to each other as if finger to finger, familiar, so familiar there would be none of this forethought, no planning, just the evening, this place drenched with birds, their songs, the path long with flowers and sky, the promising all of a world surreptitiously doing this, our courting, for us, it falling in love with us, and so might we have each other stumbled over our quiet wordless into such a place, a place so small in the wide world no one would think to bother it with words, not even us, a space so perfectly beyond compass and map, blue lines and ink, that it might hold time timeless and give back to us for having been there, blind and breathless, ourselves, within the open borders of love. Copyright 2006-2012 by Cook Communication |