John Unterecker

I Beginnings: a chrysalis improvisation in the wings, roles taking on flesh before a role begins… as light begins in the elm, pushing the long elm branches into night, a ghost light pressing sky… or actors, swollen with strange selves, distended to the edges of tight skin, a brightness under moth-wing fingertips. White arms stretch out toward truth. The stage is full of light. Your brightness gloves my skin. II Alice, grown huge, swollen to fit of the tunnels, tiny, unable to reach a gold key, knew what gardens were for— yet never knelt in tunnels of rough sunlight to will flamboyance from green buds. The swollen poppy twists within its cap, a pink invention wrestling light. How often I think of tunneling roots, curtains of roots, white ropes that stroked our hair when we entered tunnels. Here, we are rubbed on gold. This wedge of pink beginnings troubles gardens. III A robin listens to darkness. I think of worms, grubs, moles, the slow ballet of rootlets twisting down, of cave fish, blacksnakes, and, asleep at Nieux, the great black bulls that thunder on dark walls. When we wear another self, do our souls darken? On a bright stage, do we enter darkest places? IV There is darkness clinging to the undersides of leaves. For we are entering darkness. It skuffs along cave walls, stumbling and skuffing fingertips. At Mycenae, it is a heavy must, a musty heavy breath in the hundred-step cistern. They wait, dark passageways in old houses, their worn silence frayed under a blur of footsteps. Our stretched-out hands manipulate evasive cellar shadows. Within the garden, silence darkens windblown leaves. V Oh I think of Alice gone down, down under groundcover dreams, a man’s tunneled night. Who are these actors? On dream stages, I forget lines. My tongue-tied silence foundering…     Stage props mumble rigidities.        The audience… I think of silences at Nieux, at Mycenae, the tourists gone, guides returned to wives, houses…. And those silences of capricious light. The calex splits, an abrupt pink flame. Orpheus’ torch descends and still descends through arias of reddest blossom.

My liveliest self, I give you fair leave in these windblown weathers, heather-hearted and human and strange, to turn every blackberry corner of yesterday’s summer. The robin, singing her love-me-forever, kiss-catch-clutch-in the heather blues, sings tide flow and autumn’s turning and white winds folding. Cattle along all hedges wind winter into their frosty breathing, their slow eyes dreaming barn, bullock, and fodder under all hedges. But sea cave and sycamore tell us the world is wider than weather. Blackberries darken the corners I turn, and gold seas turning darken, darken. My liveliest self, my other, Godspeed on our farings. The bronze path at evening.            Toward summer, then.                        My hand, your hand— as if first meeting.

Proof Sheets: 36 Prints These photographs are the index of an hour, memory clocked along negative margins: one through twelve, one through twelve, one through twelve. Even in a sequence there is choice, as when I chose not to photograph silences between words— choice of the parted lips— or choose now a sequence out of time. Scissors: chopped time. Rearrangement is good: You are characters in a drama called then. You are figures for mythology. I shall make Phaedra blonde, Theseus dark, Hippolytus blonde— blue eyes: blue eyes; that will do— Antigone singing in the graveyard wind, a twelve-year old who is Jocasta alternate weeks. Neither imagination nor my willing flesh can move this hand one fraction of an inch; a shift of stance could have juxtaposed mouths. The fixed frame is the drama: Hippolytus at banquet; Phaedra in her chamber, behind her that painting blurred into an omen, as if Theseus were Creon, Meleager, shepherd, faun; Oedipus barefoot, hairskin beast; Antigone maenad, Helen, Artemis. Only out-of-focus figures move.

At dusk, a great flare of winter lightning photographed the bay: Waves were broken scrolls.          Beyond Donegal, white mountains hung in a narrow bas-relief frozen on sky. Later, there was sleet: trees down on the Drumholm road; near Timoney’s farm, a frantic goose pinned under branches. All night long, we spoke of loneliness, long winter, while winter sang in the chimneys. Then the sky cleared and a marvel began: The hills turned blue; in the valley a blue cottage sent up the day’s first plume of smoke. It gathered like a dream drenched in frost. That should have been all.                           We had worn out night. But single-file,  deliberate,  five heifers,  a black bull,  three calves stepped  through the broken fence. They arranged themselves between the house and hedge: a kind of diagram: a shifting pattern grazing frozen weeds. Their image is with me still.               The backs of the cattle are patchy with frost blue as morning.

Mortal and full of praise, I watch the enchanted hero busy at his chores: desert, tundra, prairie restless under an easy stride. Dagger in belt, sword slapping thigh, he passes from sight, the restored land sprung airily to green praise. Arachnid webs entangle life. A busyness of thread weaves silk into night— the long shudder of moonlight, a transfixed eye shuddering. Nothing is so easy as death, I try to say. But the hard fact of glazed eyes, the boy turned to solitude, lies face up in the center of all webs, roads unwinding stubble. Whoever is alone walks brittle filaments, late stars smudged on dawn, a night sky’s frayed dawn. Dare we evaluate life: This hero’s gesture charms eternity? Someone who paused here once on an ordinary day, troubled by the impatience of his calling, set up a hasty signpost: “Toward…” Nothing is so scarred as this place, shards of parched cloth trampled by footprints coiling crazed centers. Fresh with spring, light breezes play on dust. A whisper of rain. Ropes of skeined thunder twist sky.

The canyon walls close in again, slant light a silver glare in brown water. The water is only knee deep, but when the boy reaches the boulders— purple dark, silvered by the smash of brute water— water will tear at his chest and arms. The walls of the canyon are brilliant in late light. They would have glared red and gold for his drowned camera: splashed blood to his left, to his right a wall of sun laddered with boulders. More than boulders.    Some stranger once fought down this cliffside, his rope of twisted dry vines strung boulder to boulder, clifftop to arroyo.    Escape.    Escape maybe.    Maybe bones in the desert. I think of hands scuffed raw from the braiding. Almost….  Water froths over the boulders, tugs at the boy’s footing.       Almost…. The blood cliff to his left blinds him.    Blind nails scrape at two boulders, a torn vine whipping somewhere above him. He wedges knees against polished rock, pressing up, clawing slick stone. Now.    Rope cutting his hand, he skids underwater: silver and froth, a film of bright blood staining his eyes. But he drags hand over hand up out of the water, climbing the sun hand over hand, the ancient vines holding, boulders for foothold, up out of that canyon.