Jay Wright

(1) Nothing that exists can be temporal; still I come to lay this stick upon these altars, those three definitions of sun, the border and thick measure of lost perfection. Sun must acknowledge this state, an iconic message, abrupt invention of death; we shall call it an accomplishment, or a causal relation. The mask measures my intent on a patch of earth, a spent measure, a return, that red unruly seat of the dead. (2) Could the Cusan speak of love as a return, a plentitude of absence, an imprecise count of the dark from which he would always turn? The binukedine know how to entice the expansive energy flowing from grace, an absolute measure, a stellar device. I would propose a failed sun, a sacrifice that spins an ambiguous body in time, in trust to a sacred field, death's other price. Call this, too, an intrinsic order, a rhyme of resuscitated bodies, pure, sublime in their perturbative intent, a concern of rhythms and designs set upon an urn. (3) This must be what is the case, nani in the manifold, dannu, milestone, the embrace of albarga mask, the cold design the solstice will prove. Nothing under law will hold. What established light will move or change the structure of light, light an order to disprove? Speak of the possible mask, of its finite correlation to love, the logical slight derivation and mark of corrupted space, that fugitive event that will leave no trace. (4) Bogged in a bone order, syntax and substance of the passing world, I place my duge in the fragile arms of silence. So much for the quick embrace of the ceasing instant, the chaste argument only the dead can efface. Say that I have written my absolute descent and stable transformation through a sounding tone to one that now is spent. Praise this instant collation, paradox and migration of souls without assurance or the due gift of distance.

Somewhere between here and Belen, the Rio Grande will narrow to a muddy bead, no more than three feet across from shore to shore. My friend, Nick Markulis, claims he loves the river's color there, and will bathe his toes in the water, and will go on and on about a dry river in Athens that measures its life in olive groves. Stratis Thalassinos told me about these peculiar waters that disappear and turn up again, and, of course, you know of Arethusa's fountain in Syracuse. I do not accuse Markopoulos (do I have the name right?—Markopoulos, Markulis, fugitive names, fugitive lives docking in Halifax) of being too conversant with asphodel meadows, but one cannot remain composed when hunters and cultic figures press their claims upon a sainted afternoon. Think now of the intimate authority of La Candelaria, the Sunday morning concert, the walk through the abandoned streets, where all was an occasion of Bogotá, a memory of Mazatlán, a shaping necessity we might have met at Salamis. Who can be sure that this white cloth will be dissolved by death?

1 One could sing October rain, and one had a gift for plain chant and prayer, a domain unsettled by love or its intimate other. What fits with this theology no one dares to say. These twins so perfectly in tune must know "the modesty of nature," the perfect art and texture that sustains the other name. Paris could not be the frame for loyal Romans, their shame worn upon their bodies light as air, and nothing is quite as endurable as death. Those who have taken this path move with an abiding breath. Such a common dance this dense intention of love's expense. Keep this for that special hour when the Roman drops his sour gift for abandoned splendour; et c'est la nuit, the footfall that troubles that other Paul. 2 I have learned the felicity of fire, how in its wake something picks at buried seed. Think this a most festive deed, nature's mistake, borrowed flare of a village dance, satire of the sun's course, light you read through waste, repair. Death had freed that first opaque habitation (what a widening gyre), an aspen ache, a lustrous scar that might lead to a hidden grove, or breed astonishment in its loss; all entire, a shaping breath proposes its own pyre. 3 Solitude guides me through this minor occasion; moon is my mentor, one on a spree. This notion, night's philanthropy, courts my favor. Devotion, love's predecessor, sings its tidy discretion. Such gentility reins all vigor, all caution.

I write my God in blue. I run my gods upstream on flimsy rafts. I bathe my goddesses in foam, in moonlight. I take my reasons from my mother's snuff breath, or from an old woman, sitting with a lemonade, at twilight, on the desert's steps. Brown by day and black by night, my God has wings that open to no reason. He scutters from the touch of old men's eyes, scutters from the smell of wisdom, an orb of light leaping from a fire. Press him he bleeds. When you take your hand to sacred water, there is no sign of any wound. And so I call him supreme, great artist, judge of time, scholar of all living event, the possible prophet of the possible event. Blind men, on bourbon, with guitars, blind men with their scars dulled by kola, blind men seeking the shelter of a raindrop, blind men in corn, blind men in steel, reason by their lights that our tongues are free, our tongues will redeem us. Speech is the fact, and the fact is true. What is moves, and what is moving is. We cling to these contradictions. We know we will become our contradictions, our complex body's own desire. Yet speech is not the limit of our vision. The ear entices itself with any sound. The skin will caress whatever tone or temperament that rises or descends. The bones will set themselves to a dance. The blood will argue with a bird in flight. The heart will scale the dew from an old chalice, brush and thrill to an old bone. And yet there is no sign to arrest us from the possible. We remain at rest there, in transit from our knowing to our knowledge. So I would set a limit where I meet my logic. I would clamber from my own cave into the curve of sign, an alphabet of transformation, the clan's cloak of reason. I am good when I am in motion, when I think of myself at rest in the knowledge of my moving, when I have the vision of my mother at rest, in moonlight, her lap the cradle of my father's head. I am good when I trade my shells, and walk from boundary to boundary, unarmed and unafraid of another's speech. I am good when I learn the world through the touch of my present body. I am good when I take the cove of a cub into my care. I am good when I hear the changes in my body echo all my changes down the years, when what I know indeed is what I would know in deed. I am good when I know the darkness of all light, and accept the darkness, not as sign, but as my body. This is the A of absolutes, the logbook of judgments, the good sign.

Snow hurries the strawberries from the bush. Star-wet water rides you into summer, into my autumn. Your cactus hands are at my heart again. Lady, I court my dream of you in lilies and in rain. I vest myself in your oldest memory and in my oldest need. And in my passion you are the deepest blue of the oldest rose. Star circle me an axe. I cannot cut myself from any of your emblems. It will soon be cold here, and dark here; the grass will lie flat to search for its spring head. I will bow again in the winter of your eyes. If there is music, it will be the weather's bells to call me to the abandoned chapel of your simple body.

All summer connotations fill this light, a symmetry of different scales—the site of fibrous silence, the velvet lace of iris, alders the moon can ignite. One feels the amplitude of grief, the pace of oscillating stars, power in place where time has crossed and left a breathy stain. A body needs the weight and thrust of grace. I want to parse the logic, spin and domain, the structure mourning will allow, the grain of certainty in two estates, the dance of perfect order, flowing toward its plane. That bird you see has caught a proper stance, unfaithful to its measure, a pert mischance of divination on the move, the trace of sacred darkness true to light's advance.

It should have a woman's name, something to tell us how the green skirt of land has bound its hips. When the day lowers its vermilion tapestry over the west ridge, the water has the sound of leaves shaken in a sack, and the child's voice that you have heard below sings of the sea. By slow movements of the earth's crust, or is it that her hip bones have been shaped by a fault of engineering? Some coquetry cycles this blue edge, a spring ready to come forth to correct love's mathematics. Saturday rises immaculately. The water's jade edge plays against corn-colored picnic baskets, rose and lemon bottles, red balloons, dancers in purple tights, a roan mare out of its field. It is not the moment to think of Bahia and the gray mother with her water explanation. Not far from here, the city, a mass of swift water in its own depression, licks its sores. Still, I would be eased by reasons. Sand dunes in drifts. Lava cuts its own bed at a mountain base. Blindness enters where the light refuses to go. In Loch Lomond, the water flowers with algae and a small life has taken the name of a star. You will hear my star-slow heart empty itself with a light-swift pitch where the water thins to a silence. And the woman who will not be named screams in the birth of her fading away.

Wolbe dich, Welt: Wenn die Totenmuschel heranschwimmt, will es hier läuten. Vault over, world: when the seashell of death washes up there will be a knelling. —Paul Celan, Stimmen (Voices) Death knocks all night at my door. The soul answers, and runs from the water in my throat. Water will sustain me when I climb the steep hill that leads to a now familiar place. I began, even as a child, to learn water's order, and, as I grew intact, the feel of its warmth in a new sponge, of its weight in a virgin towel. I have earned my wine in another's misery, when rum bathed a sealed throat and cast its seal on the ground. I will be bound, to the one who leads me away, by the ornaments on my wrists, the gold dust in my ears, below my eye and tied to my loincloth in a leather pouch. They dress me now in my best cloth, and fold my hands, adorned with silk, against my left cheek. Gold lies with me on my left side. Gold has become the color of distance, and of your sorrow. Sorrow lies, red clay on my brow. Red pepper caresses my temples. I am adorned in the russet-brown message the soul brings from its coming-to-be. There is a silken despair in my body that grief shakes from it, a cat's voice, controlled by palm wine and a widow's passion. It is time to feed the soul —a hen, eggs, mashed yams— and encourage the thirst resting near the right hand I see before me. Always I think of death. I cannot eat. I walk in sadness, and I die. Yet life is the invocation sealed in the coffin, and will walk through our wall, passing and passing and passing, until it is set down, to be lifted from this body's habitation. I now assume the widow's pot, the lamp that will lead me through solitude, to the edge of my husband's journey. I hold three stones upon my head, darkness I will release when I run from the dead, with my eyes turned away toward another light. This is the day of rising. A hut sits in the bush, sheltered by summe, standing on four forked ends. We have prepared for the soul's feast with pestle, mortar, a strainer, three hearthstones, a new pot and new spoon. Someone has stripped the hut's body and dressed it with the edowa. Now, when the wine speaks and the fire has lifted its voice, the dead will be clothed in hair, the signs of our grief. Sun closes down on an intensity of ghosts. It is time to close the path. It is time for the snail's pace of coming again into life, with the world swept clean, the crying done, and our ordinary garments decent in the dead one's eyes.

If you undo your do you would be strange. Hair has been on my mind. I used to lean in the doorway and watch my stony woman wind the copper through the black, and play with my understanding, show me she cóuld take a cup of river water, and watch it shimmy, watch it change, turn around and become ash bone. Wind in the cottonwoods wakes me to a day so thin its breastbone shows, so paid out it shakes me free of its blue dust. I will arrange that river water, bottom juice. I conjure my head in the stream and ride with the silk feel of it as my woman bathes me, and shaves away the scorn, sponges the grit of solitude from my skin, laves the salt water of self-esteem over my feathering body. How like joy to come upon me in remembering a head of hair and the way water would caress it, and stress beauty in the flair and cut of the only witness to my dance under sorrow's tree. This swift darkness is spring's first hour. I carried my life, like a stone, in a ragged pocket, but I had a true weaving song, a sly way with rhythm, a healing tone.

You will recall the day the dead returned to the village. Name it now the nebula of perfect expulsion. These fragments of existence spin their enclosing web, unlock the uncertainty of grace. We are late. On the third day we will dance with the beer; the vessel will be prepared for the corrupted descent of power. Radiant in its bounded estate, the spirit knows itself as the guide who moves to erase her footsteps. So once again the dance negotiates the property of being strange, that absolute desire for falling. The red roof tiles slip into the morning fog There is a red silence all around us. It will take years to learn this coherent grammar. The oriole has established an evasive coherence, infinite, exact, with its place, there where the day seems set to honor the bird's expressive deceit. Logic always fails that Carolina wren. The propositional exactitude of a certain absence draws fire upon its wings. The bird knows itself a strict proposal of faith, a ground state that moves without an absolute space. Grammatical bird, attuned to roots and implication. Love is ancient evidence, an instrument constrained, jealous of its utility, in awe of its own death; every name embraces it.