Joanna Klink

And if all those who meet or even hear of you become witness to what you are— a white country of blight beneath the last snows of spring. Could we remain quiet on earth and bear it, the war we make inside what is—it’s a long time to be here, to be still, to feel the rot inside now—bone-scrap, char, sheets of stars at the edge of a field where we are once again taken from ourselves. Could we remain here, witness to grief, one last bright dire call-and-reply, each birdsong or siren extinguished where some trueness abides, some portion we have lost our right to claim or know. It comes into any mind that would perceive it, leaf-rot, speech-rot, the deliberate ribcage of the deer, these abrupt chalk cliffs over which the confused animals fling themselves, and you, obscure, receive no response that is not suffered as the days grow long and distortions come to seem the natural course of things— what trees whose creatures stray into space— and they find they cannot land though the eyelid struggles open—no answer, no resolution— a window opened to the mute green world, weedy and driftless, a wind drilling rain, dirt, the parameters of uncertainty, of hope, what we might be against what we have done, bees crawling through the lips of the one who would say the earth turned into sour flesh— What strange rooms, what soundless movement of sky over desert where the flesh again is beaten and the emptiness extends itself while some old man looks on, a raptor in waiting, the sand-field around them blown thinly toward sun—no longer ourselves in the afternoons, evenings, weak, vague, clutched at the mouth— because we did nothing, because we lost count.

Robins in the cottonwoods, holding still as the thin snow comes. The sun seems to flood them with blood. They have settled in the empty branches while the storm-lamps spit in your limbs, red evening swinging across the sky then dropping, ragged, into your frame to stay with you as you move and smile and have opinions. Then a woman’s torso white with dawn— their rich perch is yours, there is nothing you need to expect or retrieve, like warm fields floating toward an invisible moon. A person learns stone-throated composures and barters for days of calm weather, like a man in a dream who understands the answering pressure of eyes—you ask too much. But the birds are not reckless. Every minute their fat shapes are filling with sun, and I apprentice myself to their candor. Their bodies drift on the moving branches, solid— they are not taking and keeping. They are not torn papers in a rumor of wind, their small backs brown fields holding thunderclouds up. Inside their bodies, nothing falls to the earth and dies.

Toward what island-home am I moving, not wanting to marry, not wanting too much of that emptiness at evening, as when I walked through a field at dusk and felt wide in the night. And it was again the evening that drew me back to the field where I was most alone, compassed by stems and ruts, no light of the fixed stars, no flashing in the eyes, only heather pared by dry air, shedding a small feathered radiance when I looked away, an expanse whose deep sleep seemed an unending warren I had been given, to carry out such tasks— that I might find nothing dead. And it was again the evening that drew me back to the field where I could sense no boundary— the smell of dry earth, cool arch of my neck, the darkness entirely within myself. And when I shut my eyes there was no one. Only weeds in drifts of stillness, only stalks and gliding sky. Come, black anchor, let us not be harmed. The deer leafing in the dark. The old man at the table, unable to remember. The children whose hunger is just hunger, and never desire.

THE DEEP EVENING-COLORED ROSE of the sea is closing. Sweet crude oil, orange as rust, finds an open pathway into the marsh. And what you thought would be your home, lush with grasses, is no home, drives you out into the gray-glazed gates of sleep. Blood flowers where we don’t see it. And every chance event is a high note racing from stars in sea-depths of brightness, and every shock we feel we feel only with the slack ropes of our arms. Someone wants to hide the body of oil and cannot. Someone wants to hide their hands from shame. Shark, dolphin, manatee, fish, each slick skin an undreamt tine threading its red flute-dusk through fumes. Sound of the flood-dark pulse. Then the second when the water makes no sound. THE OLD VANDALS WERE FLOODS AND BOATS eroding the banks. The islands that once dotted the bays have sunk, disappearing into silverish grit, thinned into algae and filament now being made quiet by plumes. Despite ourselves we are made quiet. The death of the sea a thing we must lower ourselves into to imagine. I will stay with you here inside the sheen of orange that quickly kills, not like the saltwater slowly starving the freshwater- marshes and grasses that knit this green-wet world together. The two breathless gannets found covered in oil are not unlike you, at the mercy of a mercy that moves in plumes, that insists certain fates remain invisible. What existed before the oil arrived was delicate and mired, a broom of moonlight swept through half-choked waves. I trust you if you wish for what it, too, might have been. LEADING INTO THE BAY are soft green expanses of grasses, saltwater channels, slicks not glimpsed here before. The birds bathe where they can, in half-damp shadows that make possible the next free climb into air. There is nothing beyond our means to feel it— oil pushing up to the surface where the surface-dwellers die, turtles pulling in from the Gulf for nesting. If I close my eyes I can hear the faint blue traces of blood over-gathered by oil and the sound of ice near the seafloor. There will be a time when nothing living moves, a degradation of stillness beyond any liquid scar. Still, the solutions of despair are weak if you believe you can touch an undersea reef, the belly of a small wounded whale. You have the power to feel it. The breath of the animal moving like trust into your arms. BEFORE THE HOUR WHEN THE COAST slid into ocean we thought we saw a patch of sun greening in waves. The slip of a fish. There was a need so deep in our bodies we could not even weep. We called for an end and that end did not come. Power after power, our machine tools and cutting tools did nothing to hold back the brown clouds rippling in chaotic columns toward the light. And what the skies mean, passing over beds of tarred seaweed, feels unutterable, like the darkness around a candle. Where had we hoped to live? You came into the month with dreams. You walked on those beaches even though you knew they were sick. The bird that sought the reeds to die in, the fish gill-soaked with oils— you gathered them into yourself as if you alone could bring back their flickering. And overhead the novae exploded toward you along tracks of gas and dust, and the fields of ocean rose into you, and the crabs broke from their cancer fossils in masses of tiny flowers and you felt inside you the islands re-arise, flushed from the thickening imbalance of the earth. (Is there some refuge beyond ourselves that is vast enough? The sea is without grief. As are the days.)

Some feel rain. Some feel the beetle startle in its ghost-part when the bark slips. Some feel musk. Asleep against each other in the whiskey dark, scarcely there. When it falls apart, some feel the moondark air drop its motes to the patch-thick slopes of snow. Tiny blinkings of ice from the oak, a boot-beat that comes and goes, the line of prayer you can follow from the dusking wind to the snowy owl it carries. Some feel sunlight well up in blood-vessels below the skin and wish there had been less to lose. Knowing how it could have been, pale maples drowsing like a second sleep above our temperaments. Do I imagine there is any place so safe it can’t be snapped? Some feel the rivers shift, blue veins through soil, as if the smokestacks were a long dream of exhalation. The lynx lets its paws skim the ground in snow and showers. The wildflowers scatter in warm tints until the second they are plucked. You can wait to scrape the ankle-burrs, you can wait until Mercury the early star underdraws the night and its blackest districts. And wonder. Why others feel through coal-thick night that deeply colored garnet star. Why sparring and pins are all you have. Why the earth cannot make its way towards you.

The door to the past is a strange door. It swings open and things pass through it, but they pass in one direction only. No man can return across that threshold, though he can look down still and see the green light waver in the weeds. Loren Eiseley A door opens in the wilderness. People cross through it–bloused women families Acquaintances friends all the ones I have loved Sleep-walkers night-walkers each dazed and shorn– Street aurous with ice, a snowfall scratched into Moons–and everything I’d known– Inside the bleak floating light of my lungs In the capillaries of my eyes a blood Glancing through the hatches– If I said I would always be grateful If I lied or touched with spite If night is just a foamline of shadows Though we were both lost–the door Opening–the fear of being shown Whole to the one who must love you still– And stopped as if on a walk to say Look at that and what matters what really counts And I’ll tell you everything if you promise I promise I stood at door and behind me heard Snow-plows scrape against roads At the center of night–unknown to yourself And the word I said out-loud to no one That meant it was all to no purpose The word for the desire inside destruction For everything that can never be brought back– Loose snow blown hard to each bank And the common reel of those who To avoid one extreme rush toward its opposite– Snow blasted to piles–and never opened up to Anything that could reach me until you reached me– Which hours belonged to us When was I unknowingly alone Why did you always return to walk here a path Behind my closed eyes shedding salt Dry snowfall and sticks–still were you here With me I might say The moon rose in the casement window The red-haired boy across the street has learned to ride his bike There are still picnics there are fountains And the world I am leaving behind says One learns to see one learns to be kind– I closed my eyes I closed my hands I shut down the fields in my arms The cattle on the plains veins ditches Blue ravines a gray bird Sailing through a poplar brake kids Throwing snow I closed the last swinging juncos Sheep wool caught on barbed wire I closed Fumes and clear patches of sky I seized The river the town I shut down The hard muscles of sleep farmlands Warming under midnight salt-lights scruff-pines On the ridge animals scattering across slopes I closed The smooth bone of evening a storm On the hills white and noiseless spindled Prairies where I was born I shut I seized The clouds I closed in ager–fervor–ardor

When everything finally has been wrecked and further shipwrecked, When their most ardent dream has been made hollow and unrecognizable, They will feel inside their limbs the missing shade of blue that lingers Against hills in the cooler hours before dark, and the moss at the foot of the forest When green starts to leave it. What they take into their privacy (half of his embrace, Her violence at play) are shadows of acts which have no farewells in them. Moons unearth them. And when, in their separate dwellings, their bodies Feel the next season come, they no longer have anyone to whom To tell it. Clouds of reverie pass outside the window and a strange emptiness Peers back in. If they love, it is solely to be adored, it is to scatter and gather Themselves like hard seeds in a field made fallow by a fire someone years ago set. In the quiet woods, from the highest trees, there is always something Weightless falling; and he, who must realize that certain losses are irreparable, Tells himself at night, before the darkest mirror, that vision keeps him whole. On the verge of warm and simple sleep they tell themselves certain loves Are like sheets of dark water, or ice forests, or husks of ships. To stop a thing Such as this would be to halve a sound that travels out from a silent person’s Thoughts. The imprint they make on each other’s bodies is worth any pain They may have caused. Quiet falls around them. And when she reaches For him the air greens like underwater light and the well-waters drop. They will see again the shadows of insects. They will touch the bark and feel each age of the tree fly undisturbed Into them. If what is no longer present in them cannot be restored, It can at least be offered. Through long bewildered dusks, stalks grow; Rains fill and pass out of clouds; animals hover at the edges of fields With eyes like black pools. For nothing cannot be transformed; Pleasure and failure feed each other daily. Do not think any breeze, Any grain of light, shall be withheld. All the stars will sail out for them.

So here are the strange feelings that flicker in you or anchor like weights in your eyes. Turn back and you might undo them, the way trees seem to float free of themselves as they root. A swan can hold itself on the gray ice water and not waver, an open note upon which minor chords blur and rest. But it was born dark. The shore of that lake is littered with glass. How you came to be who you are was all unwinding, aimless on a bike, off to retrieve a parcel that could only be a gift, and felt, as a child, the sea weave around your feet, white light rushing in with the surf. What lived there? —Joy, dispatched from nowhere, and no need to think about your purpose, and no fear that the sun gliding down might burn the earth it feeds. Black habitat of now in which decimation looks tender. Sometimes the call of a bird is so clear it bruises my hands. At night, behind glass, light empties out then fills a room and the people in it, hovering around a fire, gorgeous shapes of wind leaning close to each other in laughter. From this distance, they are a grace, an ache. The kingdom inside.

I brought what I knew about the world to my daily life and it failed me. I brought senseless accidents and a depravity sprung inside the jaw. Also I brought what I had learned of love, an air of swift entrance and exit, a belief in trouble and desire. It will amount to something I was told, and I was told to hold fast to decency, to be spotlit and confident. I was told next year’s words await another voice. But you are a hard mouth to speak to and if I write the list it will be free of constancy. It will include fierce birds, false springs, a few oil lamps that need quickly to be lit. Also dusk and weeds and a sleep that permits utter oblivion from our stranded century. This is not a natural world, and if there are recoveries from confusion, they pass like rains. I don’t look to the robins for solace; neither do I trust that to make an end is to make a beginning. If we are not capable of company, we can at least both touch the quartet inside evening, the snow inside the willow, the bewildering kinship of ice and sky. But as I walked I saw crows ripping at shapes on the street, a square of sunlight flare on the roof. Take my hand, if only here and not in the time that remains for us to spend together. We will stand and watch the most delicate weathers move, second by second, through the grim neighborhood. I will lean into you, who have loved me in your way, knowing where you are and what you care for.

I saw you fall to the ground. I saw the oaks fall.  The clouds collapsed. I saw a wildness twist through your limbs and fly off.  The river fell, the grasses fell. The backs of six drowned cattle rose to the surface ice—nothing moved. But a wind touched my ankles when the snow began. You left that night and we stayed, our arms braced with weight.  What power there was was over.  But I switched on the light by the porch to see if anything was falling— and it fell, a few glints in the air, catching sun although there was no sun, and the long descent over hours, all night, seemed like years, and we buried our faces in what came to rest on the ground or moved our feet over it, effortless, as nothing was in our lives, or ever will be.