Clarence Major

Our ropes are the roots of our life. We fish low in the earth, the river beneath runs through our veins, blue and cold in a riverbed. When the sun comes up, the moon moves slowly to the left. I tie the logs and limbs together, holding them in place. The ocean beats them smooth like rock. Here my sense of time is flat. I find in a strip of damp sand footprints and marks of hands, and torn pieces of flesh. Night is a beast. The tide moves, gushing back and forth. Sunlight touches our faces, turning us, turning us, turning us in our morning sleep. 1976

1. INSIDE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A TREE Beautiful women in smoky blue culottes lying around on fluffy pink pillows beneath windows onto charming views, sea views, seasonal leaves and trees. Inside is outside and outside inside. Smell of saltwater swimming in the room. 2. OUTSIDE FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF A ROCKING CHAIR Shadow of lighthouse along the beach. Whales spotted every day lately though winter’s two months yet. The evening is as warm as an interior. Silverlight lagoonlight, snorkeling light. And a line of joggers against last light. Blue smoke snaking up the pink sky.

It’s not solely the dance of the juggler but his spirit: with its turkey wings, perfect thighs, sensuous hips, large round flat eye. This eye smiles like lips. Watch this eye— it’s not a donkey eye. It’s not solely the dancer who moves like a circus animal as though to children’s music—no, it’s the girl in the swing’s rhythm, the ticking of the clock at night, the strut of the cock, the flight of the holy family to the remains. The nipple that feeds the infant is an eye looking into his future. It’s not even the village square with its musicians and happy faces that makes the difference—no, because if it were, weddings with violins, harps, flutes would have settled the question: no, it is the rising and lifting, the failing and catching of that unknown sense of self before it crashes, that matters.

based on an old photograph bought in a shop at Half Moon Bay, summer, 1999 No sound, the whole thing. Unknown folk. People waving from a hillside of ripple grass to people below in an ongoing meadow. Side rows of trees waving in a tide of wind, and because what is moving is not moving, you catch a state of stasis. Opposite of this inactivity you imagine distant music and buzzing and crickets and that special hot smell of summer. To the garden past the Bay to the meadow, cliff sheltered with low clouds, offset by nodding thistle. Tatter-wort and Stinking Tommy along footpath worn down by locals. But who and why? In the photograph itself you’re now looking the other way to unknown clusters of houses. Where forces are balanced to near perfection. Who could live in such a great swollen silence and solitude? You hear church bells from Our Lady’s Tears breaking that silence nicely but just in the right way so silence continues as though nothing else matters day after day. And anyway, each face seems so familiar. What do you do when you wave back? You wave vigorously. You remember your own meadow, your cliffside and town, photographs forgotten, the halfhearted motion of your hand, your grandmother’s church-folk gathering on a Sunday afternoon in saintly quietness. You name the people whose names are not written on the back. You forgive them for wrapping themselves in silence. You enter house after house and open top-floor windows and you wave down to future generations like this.

It wasn’t working. Didn’t look back. Needed something else. So I went out. After lunch I saw it in a different light, like a thing emerging from behind a fever bush, something reaching the senses with the smell of seaweed boiling, and as visible as yellow snowdrops on black earth. Tasted it too, on the tongue Jamaica pepper. To the touch, a velvet flower. Dragging and scumming, I gave myself to it stroke after stroke. It kept coming in bits and fits, fragments and snags. I even heard it singing but in the wrong key like a deranged bird in wild cherries, having the time of its life.

A Montparnasse August with view of the Cimetière. A yard of bones. We wake to it. Close curtains to it. Wake to its lanes. Rows of coffin-stones in varying light. Walking here. Late with shade low, low, long. We’re passing through, just passing through neat aisles of gray mausoleums. (From Paris. Send this postcard. This one. Calm water lilies. Water lilies. Nothing colorless.) It’s morning. Baudelaire’s tomb. Tree limbs casting shadow west. This, a lot of time under a looming sky. Nobody has time like this. (Time to go to Le Mandarin for coffee every day. We’re not complaining. They bring the milk separate. Watch the passersby on Saint-Germain.) Nothing to ponder. This is the plight. Pause by Pigeon in bed with his wife — both fully dressed. Pink flowers, pink flowers, just beneath de Beauvoir’s name. When she lived she lived two doors down. Went south in August. All of us smell of heat all the time. We are the living. Oh dear! There are the dead ones there. Their thoughts more familiar, though. Lives finished, nearly clear. And they make it possible for us to go on living as we do in their blue shade.