Emily Warn

The word comes along out of the mountain every once in awhile to chill me. Undercurrent of an unwillingness to believe all is well in early spring beside a molten river riven by sun, its loud hush and glug through leafless aspens split by a gravel bar’s pulled switch. A bull trout with fluorescent red dorsal fin eddies in a pool between a sloughed-off root clump and caved-in grassy bank. Last year’s downed trees, slash piles, busted garden gate. Heed me and hear my loneliness. Split by a desire to be known by a crowd of solitaires and by one word split. A raven falls out of the yellow flame of a willow. Its wings purely black buff sunlight. It paces the gravel bar, lifts into westerly sun. Wing flash. Black luster. Gone. It is hope that tricks. Belief that when this now shines, this now shines with or without us. Then why scribble the veery’s mid-morning marshal song? Soon Rick will arrive to help burn wood piles: gasoline newspaper cedar shakes to start the blaze in this emptiness searching for godwords. The ones God hears when priests without shoes without socks with their shawls stretched over their heads arms out make forts of light. Their backs to the congregation, their faces toward the ark, they rock. Their white wings so pure that this now is no more than then with its barbells of silence, with its task of burning.

You slow down to watch cumulus clouds stream across the sky. You choose a more circuitous route home and pass a tree with white bags tied around random apples. The apples remind you of clouds, how each hangs in the sky, singular yet part of a flock. Each item in the flock is a coordinate of earth and sky, enumerating space. The flocks of apples and clouds are actual infinities, an endless collection of discrete items that one can conceivably count to the end. This is different from potential infinity, which is the entirety of infinity, an immeasurable continuum that is greater than the sum of its parts. After your first glimpse, you are lonely for more contraction of space around the light of your mind contemplating what cannot be conceived. What cannot be conceived this morning? The Army has found the larynx of an Iraqi man that American soldiers slowly strangled to death. His ribs, additional evidence for the trial, are still missing. They are in a refrigerator in Washington, D.C. These are discrete items; whereas how the passage of time felt as the soldiers strangled him is a continuum of infinite pain. And his words and songs and prayers and curses he will never speak are an empty set.

Hope fills me this morning as I fashion letters into a tree that sighs, that stays put yet moves, reaching to its limits, swaying and settling, a compass pointing to its place on earth where every morning it blocks the sun for me, at work in my studio, where I scratch and scrawl and loop letters into shapes so I can enter the Tabernacle of their bodies and hear each foot, each syllable sending its roots to a depth as great as that tree’s, which has been standing and rooting and swaying long before I came to memorize its plain mystery, its wide-bodied hull open to stars at night, each a point that I lengthen into a letter and each letter into a word, and with the words build a Tabernacle for the ten most broken and the ten most resonant words. I will place them in an inner sanctum enclosed by hanging carpets, and outside it, another space enclosed by carpets, and outside it, another, so that those who wish to read the words, to say them out loud, must first pull one curtain back and step inside, and then another, and another until they arrive in a hushed space, a soundproofed, heavy quiet where they come to know that which makes all things day after day, and out of which the earth was made. Stepping behind each curtain they learn that the mystery of making is not a secret hidden within but a series of moves, a sequence of steps, outlined on a blueprint with notes and call-outs, white on black, constellations in the night sky, the primordial living Torah, circulating in the letters as trees circulate light, capturing it with their leaves, caching it within the soil, then drawing it back up, watering the tallest branches with the radiant dark.

To invent the alef-beit, decipher the grammar of crows, read a tangle of bare branches with vowels of the last leaves scrawling their jittery speech on the sky’s pale page. Choose a beginning. See what God yields and dirt cedes when tines disturb fescue, vetch, and sage, when your hand dips grain from a sack, scattering it among engraved furrows. Beyond the hill, a plume of dust where oxen track the hours. Does God lead or follow or scout? To answer, count to one again and again: a red maple leaf and a yellow maple leaf that wind rifles and rain shines until they let go, blazing their scripted nothingness on air.

With coals of juniper, Lord, with ripped willow clumps, with lodge-pole pine and fir, with wind-wrack and slash, I kindle an all-night fire to mirror You. No longer waning, no longer falsifying chimes. No longer smoking out rot, or eclipsing Yeshiva scholars. No Lord I know what is within magnified. Stars will just have to wait to eddy through gates of night. Little swirl, mimicking nebulae, mimicking galaxies, which turns for no apparent reason other than to cast and recast the whole as it whirs and whirls, knocks and ticks at three am in a snit to proclaim itself not as You but it in You. If I can strut a note, can rack wobbly pins, balance rocks into signposts, waves into a grass mass or two, it will hear itself structuring time. This oddly chopped watched dimension quarters us into early middle late. Each day scans and wanes, some hope knowing its moaning is mourning what it erases. The and stamped by the sea each second. Be with it and what it erases ceases to toll.

The King asks, “Tell me, what is the highest meaning of the holiest truths?” The Seer answers, “Emptiness, without holiness.” The King is a restless seeker. The Seer is a ruler and thief. I am seriously watching how trees are always missing some leaves. They sweep the air looking for them. Nothing distracts them. Nothing. Where leaves are missing between the branches, beautiful sun porches, which disappear when the tree reaches them. “Who are you?” the King asks. “It is not like that,” the Seer says. The Seer leaves the King alone in his throne room and starts walking to China, kicking up gravel, hurrying to find the next king. On the road between country houses, he stops to listen to trees digging the air for crickets. He wonders whether the King is mad now like the trees, or dancing and recounting the story without an end.