Mark Jarman

Amazing to believe that nothingness Surrounds us with delight and lets us be, And that the meekness of nonentity, Despite the friction of the world of sense, Despite the leveling of violence, Is all that matters. All the energy We force into the matchhead and the city Explodes inside a loving emptiness. Not Dante’s rings, not the Zen zero’s mouth, Out of which comes and into which light goes, This God recedes from every metaphor, Turns the hardest data into untruth, And fills all blanks with blankness. This love shows Itself in absence, which the stars adore.

Drunk on the Umbrian hills at dusk and drunk On one pink cloud that stood beside the moon, Drunk on the moon, a marble smile, and drunk, Two young Americans, on one another, Far from home and wanting this forever— Who needed God? We had our bodies, bread, And glasses of a raw, green, local wine, And watched our Godless perfect darkness breed Enormous softly burning ancient stars. Who needed God? And why do I ask now? Because I’m older and I think God stirs In details that keep bringing back that time, Details that are just as vivid now— Our bodies, bread, a sharp Umbrian wine.

Half asleep in prayer I said the right thing And felt a sudden pleasure come into The room or my own body. In the dark, Charged with a change of atmosphere, at first I couldn’t tell my body from the room. And I was wide awake, full of this feeling, Alert as though I’d heard a doorknob twist, A drawer pulled, and instead of terror knew The intrusion of an overwhelming joy. I had said thanks and this was the response. But how I said it or what I said it for I still cannot recall and I have tried All sorts of ways all hours of the night. Once was enough to be dissatisfied.

Dear God, Our Heavenly Father, Gracious Lord, Mother Love and Maker, Light Divine, Atomic Fingertip, Cosmic Design, First Letter of the Alphabet, Last Word, Mutual Satisfaction, Cash Award, Auditor Who Approves Our Bottom Line, Examiner Who Says That We Are Fine, Oasis That All Sands Are Running Toward. I can say almost anything about you, O Big Idea, and with each epithet, Create new reasons to believe or doubt you, Black Hole, White Hole, Presidential Jet. But what’s the anything I must leave out? You Solve nothing but the problems that I set.

Balmy overcast nights of late September; Palms standing out in street light, house light; Full moon penetrating the cloud-film With an explosive halo, a ring almost half the sky; Air like a towel draped over shoulders; Lightness or gravity deferred like a moral question; The incense in the house lit; the young people Moving from the front door into the half-dark And back, or up the stairs to glimpse the lovers’ shoes Outside the master bedroom; the youngest speculating; The taste of beer, familiar as salt water; Each window holding a sea view, charcoal With shifting bars of white; the fog filling in Like the haze of distance itself, pushing close, blurring. As if the passage into life were through such houses, Surrounded by some version of ocean weather, Lit beads of fog or wind so stripped it burns the throat; Mildew-spreading, spray-laden breezes and the beach sun Making each grain of stucco cast a shadow; An ideal landscape sheared of its nostalgia; S. with his black hair, buck teeth, unsunned skin, Joking and disappearing; F. doing exactly the same But dying, a corkscrew motion through green water; And C. not looking back from the car door, Reappearing beside the East River, rich, owned, smiling at last. Swains. and nymphs. And news that came with the sea damp, Of steady pipe-corrosions, black corners, Moisture working through sand lots, through slab floors, Slowly, with chemical, with molecular intricacy, Then, bursting alive: the shrieked confessions Of the wild parents; the cliff collapse; the kidnap; The cache of photos; the letter; the weapon; the haunted dream; The sudden close-up of the loved one’s degradation. Weather a part of it all, permeating and sanctifying, Infiltrating and destroying; the sun disc, Cool behind the veil of afternoon cloud, With sun spots like flies crawling across it; The slow empurpling of skin all summer; The glorious learned flesh and the rich pallor Of the untouched places in the first nakedness; The working of the lesion now in late life, Soon to be known by the body, even the one Enduring the bareness of the inland plains, The cold fronts out of Canada, a sickness For home that feels no different from health.

Night’s afterbirth, last dream before waking, Holding on with dissolving hands, Out of it came, not a line of old men, But pairs of headlights, delaying morning. It felt like tears, like wetted bedsheets, And suspended in it like a medicine In vapor was the ocean’s presence, ghost Of deep water and the bite of salt. Here you found your body again, The hand before your face and the face it touched, Eyes floating, feet on invisible ground, Vagueness like another skin. Sent out into it anyway, because it was morning, To taste it, touch blind hardness Like marble ruins, and skirt the edges, Razors in goosedown, hydrants’ fists. Abruptly out of it waves appeared, Transmuted from hanging silver ore, crafted Before the eyes into curving metals That broke into soup scum, Queen Anne’s lace. Out of a great nothing, a theology. Out of the amorphous, an edgeless body Or one like a hunting mass of tendrils That hurried down the sand, moved by hunger. I remember a gang of friends Racing a fog bank’s onslaught along the beach. Seal-slick, warm from the sun This thing would eat, they ran laughing. The fog came on. And they were beautiful, The three boys and one girl, still in her wetsuit, And the dissolution overtaking them, Their stridency, full of faith, still audible. All morning bathed in a dovelike brooding. The fog satisfied itself by overwhelming The meagre dew, watering the doors 0f snails, the leeward mold, and held still. And then near noon there was a concentration As if the sky tried to find a slippery word Or remember—that’s right—remember Where it was in an unfamiliar bedroom. And knew. And switched the light on. Wide awake.

Everything’s happening on the cusp of tragedy, the tip of comedy, the pivot of event. You want a placid life, find another planet. This one is occupied with the story’s arc: About to happen, on the verge, horizontal. You want another planet, try the moon. Try any of the eight, try Planet X. It’s out there somewhere, black with serenity. How interesting will our times become? How much more interesting can they become? A crow with something dangling from its beak flaps onto a telephone pole top, daintily, And croaks its victory to other crows and tries to keep its morsel to itself. A limp shape, leggy, stunned, drops from the black beak’s scissors like a rag. We drive past, commenting, and looking upward. A sunny morning, too cold to be nesting, Unless that is a nest the crow has seized, against the coming spring. We’ve been at this historical site before, but not in any history we remember. The present has been cloaked in cloud before, and not on any holy mountaintop. To know the stars will one day fly apart so far they can’t be seen Is almost a relief. For the future flies in one direction—toward us. And the only way to sidestep it—the only way—is headed this way, too. So, look. That woman’s got a child by the hand. She’s dragging him across the street. He’s crying and she’s shouting, but we see only dumbshow. Their breath is smoke. Will she give in and comfort him? Will he concede at last? We do not know. Their words are smoke. In a minute they’ll be somewhere else entirely. Everyone in a minute will be somewhere else entirely. As the crow flies.

1. Let us think of God as a lover Who never calls, Whose pleasure in us is aroused In unrepeatable ways, God as a body we cannot Separate from desire, Saying to us, “Your love Is only physical.” Let us think of God as a bronze With green skin Or a plane that draws the eye close To the texture of paint. Let us think of God as life, A bacillus or virus, As death, an igneous rock In a quartz garden. Then, let us think of kissing God with the kisses Of our mouths, of lying with God, As sea worms lie, Snugly petrifying In their coral shirts. Let us think of ourselves As part of God, Neither alive nor dead, But like Alpha, Omega, Glyphs and hieroglyphs, Numbers, data. 2. First forgive the silence That answers prayer, Then forgive the prayer That stains the silence. Excuse the absence That feels like presence, Then excuse the feeling That insists on presence. Pardon the delay Of revelation, Then ask pardon for revealing Your impatience. Forgive God For being only a word, Then ask God to forgive The betrayal of language. 3. God of the Syllable God of the Word God Who Speaks to Us God Who Is Dumb The One God  The Many God the Unnameable God of the Human Face God of the Mask God of the Gene Pool Microbe  Mineral God of the Sparrow’s Fall God of the Spark God of the Act of God Blameless  Jealous God of Surprises And Startling Joy God Who Is Absent God Who Is Present God Who Finds Us In Our Hiding Places God Whom We Thank Whom We Forget to Thank Father God   Mother Inhuman Infant Cosmic Chthonic God of the Nucleus Dead God   Living God Alpha God    Zed God Whom We Name God Whom We Cannot Name When We Open Our Mouths With the Name God   Word God 4. The new day cancels dread And dawn forgives all sins, All the judgments of insomnia, As if they were only dreams. The ugly confrontation After midnight, with the mirror, Turns white around the edges And burns away like frost. Daylight undoes gravity And lightness responds to the light. The new day lifts all weight, Like stepping off into space. Where is that room you woke to, By clock-light, at 3 a.m.? Nightmare’s many mansions, Falling, have taken it with them. The new day, the day’s newness, And the wretchedness that, you thought, Would never, never depart, Meet—and there is goodbye. A bad night lies ahead And a new day beyond that— A simple sequence, but hard To remember in the right order. 5. Lord of dimensions and the dimensionless, Wave and particle, all and none, Who lets us measure the wounded atom, Who lets us doubt all measurement, When in this world we betray you Let us be faithful in another.

One girl a full head taller Than the other—into their Sunday dresses. First, the slip, hardly a piece of fabric, Softly stitched and printed with a bud. I’m not their mother, and tangle, then untangle The whole cloth—on backwards, have to grab it Round their necks. But they know how to pull Arms in, a reflex of being dressed, And also, a child’s faith. The mass of stuff That makes the Sunday frocks collapses In my hands and finds its shape, only because They understand the drape of it— These skinny keys to intricate locks. The buttons are a problem For a surgeon. How would she connect These bony valves and stubborn eyelets? The filmy dress revolves in my blind fingers. The slots work one by one. And when they’re put together, Not like puppets or those doll-saints That bring tears to true believers, But living children, somebody’s real daughters, They do become more real. They say, “Stop it!” and “Give it back!” And “I don’t want to!” They’ll kiss A doll’s hard features, whispering, “I’m sorry.” I know just why my mother Used to worry. Your clothes don’t keep You close—it’s nakedness. Clad in my boots and holster, I would roam with my six-gun buddies. We dealt fake death to one another, Fell and rolled in filth and rose, Grimy with wounds, then headed home. But Sunday ... what was that tired explanation Given for wearing clothes that Scratched and shone and weighed like a slow hour? That we should shine—in gratitude. So, I give that explanation, undressing them, And wait for the result. After a day like Sunday, such a long one, When they lie down, half-dead, To be undone, they won’t help me. They cry, “It’s not my fault.”

What was the future then but affirmation, The first yes between us Followed by the first lingering dawn? Waking below a window shaded by redwoods (Waking? We hadn’t slept—), We found time saved, like sunlight in a tree. Still, the house was cold, and there were shadows. The couple in the next room Rapped the wall to quiet us, like them, Condescending from a bitter knowledge That, young as we all were, Love didn’t last, but receded into silence. Wedging our pillows back of the headboard That clapped in time with us, We let them think we agreed. Then, holding on, We closed each other’s mouths and felt that slowness That the best days begin with Turn into the speed with which they fly. Flight was that year’s theme, all around us— Flight of hunter and hunted, The President turning inward on one wing, And, on the patio, the emigration Of termites, a glittering fleet, Leaving that shadowed house a little lighter. Within it all, above it, or beyond, We thought we were the fixed point, And held still as the quail lit down beside us And waited for her plump mate to appear, His crest a quivering hook. The valley’s reach of sunshine reeled them in. There was wilderness around us, don’t forget. Behind the nets of fragrance Thrown across our path by the acacia Lurked the green man or the kidnapper. And there was the Pacific With its own passions taking place as rain. The sorrow of the couple in the next room Was a deep muteness nightly. That loneliness could come of loving was Like news of time cored out of the redwood. The house that we made shake, Or thought we did, was taking wing already. After we left, still it took us years Before we stopped comparing Every morning together to that first one And every place we lived to that first place And everything we said To that first word repeated all night long.