Marianne Boruch

Not that I understand things. Angels don’t walk toward the ship, old engraving where moon throws a river of light, how angels would walk the ocean if they wanted to walk. They don’t. They hover. A lot of space between them and what shines like waves. Which can’t be a choice, for angels or the engraver who was in fact Gustave Doré after sleeping off the ancient mariner Coleridge left behind under guilt and regret and an albatross’s weight. Which isn’t much, but they are big animals, four feet across counting the wind involved and rain. Doré waking to a room not really of wings. I guess a stirring, something in the black expanse he hoped to razor into the copper plate — no, a graver, not a razor at all. Beauty does terrify, a bare nothing but stop. As in angels. Abrupt. Still, to cut them their flight on metal takes a while. His hands stiff, Doré under a deadline no doubt like the small endlessly later rest of us do what we do and do until it’s not what we do. Nevertheless, angels. Why did they keep coming, one by one radiant dark of a mind paused to this most desolate given: water at night. That it floods a future not even in the picture.

Some dreamily smoke cigarettes, some track toddlers who walk like drunks. Buzzy, the picnic grounds, noisy, sun-crazed, how forks and spoons don’t exactly lie flat. A mountain’s here, a famous overlook from which you’d see none of this. Like that first daguerreotype, its moving carriages and those who strolled never picked up in the long exposure, a Paris street emptied by the camera, only houses and lamp posts gone eternal. Or the one who stopped for a shoe shine, the one who knelt to the task. At the picnic—a commotion. A large man to a younger man.

My drawing teacher said:Look,think,make a mark. Look, I told myself. And waited to be marked. Clouds are white but they darken with rain. Even a child blurs them back to little woolies on a hillside, little bundles without legs. Look, my teacher would surely tell me, they’re nothing like that.Like that: the lie.Like that: the poem. She said: Respond to the heaviest part of the figure first. Density is form. That I keep hearing destiny is not a mark of character. Like pilgrimage once morphed to mirage in a noisy room, someone so earnest at my ear. Then marriage slid. Mir-aage,Mir-aage, I heard the famous poet let loose awry into her microphone, triumphant. The figure to be drawn — not even half my age. She’s completely emptied her face for this job of standing still an hour. Look. Okay. But the little dream in there, inside the think that comes next. A pencil in my hand, its secret life is charcoal, the wood already burnt, a sacrifice.

On rain washed paper dried, ink still blurs. But all words are stains. The paper’s rippled lunar, mountain and crater, and

When I think of the dead, it means they’re thinking of me,

I walked out, and the nest was already there by the step.  Woven basket of a saint sent back to life as a bird who proceeded to make a mess of things.  Wind right through it, and any eggs long vanished.  But in my hand it was intricate pleasure, even the thorny reeds softened in the weave.  And the fading leaf mold, hardly itself anymore, merely a trick of light, if light can be tricked.  Deep in a life is another life.  I walked out, the nest already by the step.

The spell is a mouth’s perilous-o as they dark circle the boats in their most resplendent pliable armor. The concept fish aligning with girl or love with death to bring down men at sea,temptation confused into offering, the mismatch of like plus unlike really likes, straight to rock bottom. No equation has ever been this badass. It’s the men who will enter the spell so far into exhaustion as weather, as waves, the tide pulling toward if, letting go then over the whale road in the company of the dolphin, the only other animal, I’m told, who can do it solely for pleasure. It. You know what I mean. The lower half aglitter, the top half brainy as beautiful is sometimes, murderous lovelies, their plotting and resolve and why not get these guys good, the lechers. To see at all in the whirling, to hear what anyone might in wind roar and faint whistle — don’t worry about girls shrewd as whimsy, legend-tough to the core. Don’t. But it’s their spell too, isn’t it? Locked there. Aligned with singing, dazzle razor-blackened green. Not that they miss what human is like or know any end to waters half born to, from where they look up. Men in boats, so sick of the journey. Men gone stupid with blue, with vast, with gazing over and away the whole time until same to same-old to now they’re mean. After that, small. Out there, the expanse. In here, the expanse. The men look down. Aching misalignment — gorgeous lure that hides its hook steely sweet to o my god, little fool’s breath triumphant, all the way under and am I not deserving?

At the Oriental Institute, Chicago They redid King Tut splendid, once stone-huge as this yet his wife’s feet tiny, the only thing of her now low, next to him. A few toes, some of the rest, a bit of ankle, that’s it in the shade of her husband’s looming, massive looking straight ahead into the future where we live and can’t eye-to-eye, where to stare at him is to suffer warbler neck, head back and up à la the high just-leafing-out trees as bright bits wing their blink and hide. Little wife, such small feet, the thought dwarfs the king as ache, as what is ever left of us and oh, I like her better.

Everything is made of everything. — Leonardo da Vinci I found Rome in the woods. Fair to admit it’s mostly tundra to the west in the park, past Toklat the Denali I revised, low grasslands engineered to freeze deep by October — this being Alaska — the great Tabularium close to the Temple of Castor and Pollux I rebuilt that same summer — not superimposed, exact as any scheme in secret — the Arch of Septimius Severus at the gravel bar where fox drank from a river turned stream, a Theater of Marcellus near the ranger station where one raven, such a brat, complained of my Circus Maximus, Trajan’s Column, my Baths of Diocletian, too many spots soaked in unpronounceable Latin. I really did, I shouldered bits of it, a ruin-hushed haunted business, my brain a truck bed, a lift, pulleys big as a whale’s heart, expletives of cheap wonder all over my woodlot and expanse. One self-anoints to embellish day, years, life thus far, and think oneself so ... Then busted — by a raven! Well, that’s memory for you, that’s so-called civilization for you, to layer up, to redo the already done. I mean it’s a fact, the puny life span we’re allotted. And proof — Denali in August, fireweed, spunky scrawny first Latinate —Erechtites hieracifolia— giving off flowers to mark what weeks left, little time bomber, time traveler, ancient slips red-flagging the countdown to winter by climbing its own stalk. Something perverse about that. Something perfectly fiendishly self-conscious about that. • From the start perverse, any premise. Ask ... We can’t know. To be compelled makes an occasion. Rome’s grand past horrific, fire and ash, swamp into bog, lust and bloodlust — The Alaska Range dreams lurid as Rome, the worst way below being fire, summer snow at night off the highest peaks by noon as distant from our cabin as the size of a hand if I held up the one with an eye in the middle to know how this works. Some have the power to raise from the dead a before, before scary and beautiful back to mystery cults, in caves, rubble far under a Roman street, the altar to Mithras still slaying his bull, crumbling the stonework. All things being equal. But they’re not. Agony, it’s older. Ask the moose at Denali, the snowshoe hare, the lynx, such a wily courtly lot. Ask Ovid banished to his hovel on the Black Sea, aching for Rome’s exalted rude cacophony, each exiled month a big thick X down Februarius, Aprilis to home-shattered sick enough for an undersong. Look it up!Undersong: a strain; a droning; the burden of a song —

It includes the butterfly and the rat, the shit drying to chalk, trees falling at an angle, taking those moist and buried rootballs with them into deadly air. But someone will tell you the butterfly's the happy ending of every dirge-singing worm, the rat a river rat come up from a shimmering depth, the shit passed purely into scat one can read for a source, the creature that shadowed it one longish minute. And trees, of course they wanted to fall.It was their time or something equally sonorous. And wind too knows its mindless little whirlpool's not for nothing, not nothing—that pitch and rage stopped. How else does the sparrow's neck break.