Pattiann Rogers

The cat has the chance to make the sunlight Beautiful, to stop it and turn it immediately Into black fur and motion, to take it As shifting branch and brown feather Into the back of the brain forever. The cardinal has flown the sun in red Through the oak forest to the lawn. The finch has caught it in yellow And taken it among the thorns. By the spider It has been bound tightly and tied In an eight-stringed knot. The sun has been intercepted in its one Basic state and changed to a million varieties Of green stick and tassel. It has been broken Into pieces by glass rings, by mist Over the river. Its heat Has been given the board fence for body, The desert rock for fact. On winter hills It has been laid down in white like a martyr. This afternoon we could spread gold scarves Clear across the field and say in truth, "Sun you are silk." Imagine the sun totally isolated, Its brightness shot in continuous streaks straight out Into the black, never arrested, Never once being made light. Someone should take note Of how the earth has saved the sun from oblivion.

Stellar dust has settled. It is green underwater now in the leaves Of the yellow crowfoot. Its vacancies are gathered together Under pine litter as emerging flower of the pink arbutus. It has gained the power to make itself again In the bone-filled egg of osprey and teal. One could say this toothpick grasshopper Is a cloud of decayed nebula congealed and perching On his female mating. The tortoise beetle, Leaving the stripped veins of morning glory vines Like licked bones, is a straw-colored swirl Of clever gases. At this moment there are dead stars seeing Themselves as marsh and forest in the eyes Of muskrat and shrew, disintegrated suns Making songs all night long in the throats Of crawfish frogs, in the rubbings and gratings Of the red-legged locust. There are spirits of orbiting Rock in the shells of pointed winkles And apple snails, ghosts of extinct comets caught In the leap of darting hare and bobcat, revolutions Of rushing stone contained in the sound of these words. The paths of the Pleiades and Coma clusters Have been compelled to mathematics by the mind Contemplating the nature of itself In the motions of stars. The patterns Of any starry summer night might be identical To the summer heavens circling inside the skull. I can feel time speeding now in all directions Deeper and deeper into the black oblivion Of the electrons directly behind my eyes. Flesh of the sky, child of the sky, the mind Has been obligated from the beginning To create an ordered universe As the only possible proof of its own inheritance.

How confident I am it is there. Don’t I bring it, As if it were enclosed in a fine leather case, To particular places solely for its own sake? Haven’t I set it down before the variegated canyon And the undeviating bald salt dome? Don’t I feed it on ivory calcium and ruffled Shell bellies, shore boulders, on the sight Of the petrel motionless over the sea, its splayed Feet hanging? Don’t I make sure it apprehends The invisibly fine spray more than once? I have seen that it takes in every detail I can manage concerning the garden wall and its borders. I have listed for it the comings and goings Of one hundred species of insects explicitly described. I have named the chartreuse stripe And the fimbriated antenna, the bulbed thorax And the multiple eye. I have sketched The brilliant wings of the trumpet vine and invented New vocabularies describing the interchanges between rocks And their crevices, between the holly lip And its concept of itself. And if not for its sake, why would I go Out into the night alone and stare deliberately Straight up into 15 billion years ago and more? I have cherished it. I have named it. By my own solicitations I have proof of its presence.

Some say it’s in the reptilian dance of the purple-tongued sand goanna, for there the magnificent translation of tenacity into bone and grace occurs. And some declare it to be an expansive desert—solid rust-orange rock like dusk captured on earth in stone— simply for the perfect contrast it provides to the blue-grey ridge of rain in the distant hills. Some claim the harmonics of shifting electron rings to be most rare and some the complex motion of seven sandpipers bisecting the arcs and pitches of come and retreat over the mounting hayfield. Others, for grandeur, choose the terror of lightning peals on prairies or the tall collapsing cathedrals of stormy seas, because there they feel dwarfed and appropriately helpless; others select the serenity of that ceiling/cellar of stars they see at night on placid lakes, because there they feel assured and universally magnanimous. But it is the dark emptiness contained in every next moment that seems to me the most singularly glorious gift, that void which one is free to fill with processions of men bearing burning cedar knots or with parades of blue horses, belled and ribboned and stepping sideways, with tumbling white-faced mimes or companies of black-robed choristers; to fill simply with hammered silver teapots or kiln-dried crockery, tangerine and almond custards, polonaises, polkas, whittling sticks, wailing walls; that space large enough to hold all invented blasphemies and pieties, 10,000 definitions of god and more, never fully filled, never.

Although most are totally naked and too scant for even the slightest color and although they have no voice that I’ve ever heard for cry or song, they are, nevertheless, more than mirage, more than hallucination, more than falsehood. They have confronted sulfuric boiling black sea bottoms and stayed, held on under ten tons of polar ice, established themselves in dense salts and acids, survived eating metal ions. They are more committed than oblivion, more prolific than stars. Far too ancient for scripture, each one bears in its one cell one text— the first whit of alpha, the first jot of bearing, beneath the riling sun the first nourishing of self. Too lavish for saints, too trifling for baptism, they have existed throughout never gaining girth enough to hold a firm hope of salvation. Too meager in heart for compassion, too lean for tears, less in substance than sacrifice, not one has ever carried a cross anywhere. And not one of their trillions has ever been given a tombstone. I’ve never noticed a lessening of light in the ceasing of any one of them. They are more mutable than mere breathing and vanishing, more mysterious than resurrection, too minimal for death.