246 Spiritual poems

Little soul, you have wandered lost a long time. The woods all dark now, birded and eyed. Then a light, a cabin, a fire, a door standing open. The fairy tales warn you: Do not go in, you who would eat will be eaten. You go in. You quicken. You want to have feet. You want to have eyes. You want to have fears.

The builder who first bridged Niagara’s gorge, Before he swung his cable, shore to shore, Sent out across the gulf his venturing kite Bearing a slender cord for unseen hands To grasp upon the further cliff and draw A greater cord, and then a greater yet; Till at the last across the chasm swung The cable then the mighty bridge in air! So we may send our little timid thought Across the void, out to God’s reaching hands— Send out our love and faith to thread the deep— Thought after thought until the little cord Has greatened to a chain no chance can break, And we are anchored to the Infinite!

for Jerry Ward I am the only one here. I stand in my one place and I can see a good piece down the road. I am yonder, further than the chunk of your stone. Right now, directly, I am persimmon falling free and the prisoner opening up in me. Don’t come through my door and want to run my house. I am the angel who sweep air in and out my own dancing body. I got good eyes. I can see. A good piece down the road. Clear to God murmuring in me. My head is the burning bush. What I hold in my hand is the promised land. I set my people free in me. And we walk without wandering like people named after mere plants, because we are tree and high-stepping roots cake-walking in this promised place. Where I go is where I am now. Don’t mess with me: you hurt yourself. In the middle of my stride now. I am walking yes indeed I am walking through my own house. I am walking yes indeed on my own piece of road. Toting my own load and yours and mine. I tell you I feel fine and clear this morning even when it’s night and a full moon with my thumbprint on it. Everything is clamorous and quiet. I am the only One here. And we don’t break. No indeed. Come hell and high water. We don’t break for nothing.

The red sun rises without intent and shines the same on all of us. We play like children under the sun. One day, our ashes will scatter— it doesn’t matter when. Now the sun finds our innermost hearts, fills us with oblivion intense as the forest, winter and sea.

At night, alone, the animals came and shone. The darkness whirled but silent shone the animals: The lion the man the calf the eagle saying Sanctus which was and is and is to come. The sleeper watched the people at the waterless wilderness’ edge; The wilderness was made of granite, of thorn, of death, It was the goat which lightened the people praying. The goat went out with sin on its sunken head. On the sleeper’s midnight and the smaller after hours From above below elsewhere there shone the animals Through the circular dark; the cock appeared in light Crying three times, for tears for tears for tears. High in the frozen tree the sparrow sat. At three o’clock The luminous thunder of its fall fractured the earth. The somber serpent looped its coils to write In scales the slow snake-music of the red ripe globe. To the sleeper, alone, the animals came and shone, The darkness whirled but silent shone the animals. Just before dawn the dove flew out of the dark Flying with green in her beak; the dove also had come.

I learned to hide my wings almost immediately, learned to tuck and bandage them down. Long before the accident, before the glass shattering and that scene going dim, dimmer, and then dark, before the three fractures at the axis, three cracks in the bone, it had already begun. My voice had begun to deepen, the sound of it suddenly more my father's than my own. My beard had started growing, my bones growing, my bones sore from the speed of their growth, and there, at fourteen years of age, the first tugging of the muscles between my shoulder blades. It began as a tiny ache. It was just a minor irritation. Day after day passed, and this ache grew, and then the tips of the cartilaginous wings began to tent my skin. Father Callahan had already warned that in each of us there was both potential for bad and good. When trying to shave for the first time, I nicked my cheek, the bleeding slow but continuous. Standing there, dabbing at this small cut with tissue paper, the first tear surprised me, the left wing heaving through that fleshy mound of muscle between my shoulder blades and then the skin. I buckled and, on my knees, the right wing presented itself more rapidly than the left. When I stood, there in the mirror, my wings outstretched with their tiny feathers wet, almost glutinous, a quick ribbon of blood snaking down my back. You wonder why I am such a master of avoidance, such a master of what is withheld. Is there any wonder, now? I had no idea then they would wither and fall off in a few weeks. When Father Callahan patted my head in the sacristy and told me I was a good boy, a really good boy, an extraordinary boy, I wanted to be anything but extraordinary.

For Daniel Morden Athena, coming onto me (verbatim transcription): Every step you take will be the right one. Women encouraged me like that: Avoiding void, no one goes nameless in this world. Power? I was the son of a king: Hacking the armor from the limbs of the dying. In the path of the blade of the plough I met God my foe: Oh blight his voyage with trial and calamity. All he needed was a taste of his own medicine: The water was white with the blades of our oars. Long-limbed Circe, the troubled, could only bring trouble: Sure enough that month became a year. Then Demodocus struck his lyre, and sang for me: In that soft song I led one hundred lives. I was young, singing such distance, when I set out: The meters were my cloak, my map, my axe. Declensions of the beasts defined my travels: I made the lions purr; the lions licked my hands. When gulls cry over rough water, home is close: I remembered Charybdis the Swallower, in her magnificence. Horizon-soaked, I sat and sobbed. Sunset. Shoulders shaking. This was the liver’s dying, the world’s waking.

Wisdom is a kindly spirit but does it love me? And righteousness? There’s nothing in it. To poetry I leave my senses, my deregulation, custodial duties, and to be a janitor is a great consolation. It gave me my mother back through all her years. To love these children, so full of neurons and consciousness. What joy to clean up and put a shine on their mess. To my mother I leave my veil, my wing, the window and time. I, artifact. In this age the hand is a voice. I leave the voice, the wonder, the mirror, and my lens, bent and beholden to the worm, leaf-work in wrought iron, eerie illuminations and deep-sea vision. I’ve seen the Eurostar, the drunken boat, and Davy Jones’ Locker. I’ve seen Spanish galleons and the H.S. Mauberley covered in brine. There is this line from cloud dander to the solo bulb of mourning, a string through common prayer. I like it when the gray-green shadows suddenly dayglo over the rushes. The wind in my head. To write is an equal and opposite reaction my comrade, communard, my friendo. What is it finally thinking what in winter’s dusty alcove, the body tocks. The day was cloudy. The light muddy, dreary when they took it down. To Times Roman I give my stammer, my sullenness, my new world violence, form and all that, forms, and all that paper, gusts. Little buttress. I send love and weapons to everyone possessed with night visions. When those green lights flash and blink, is that it? When the “it” continues strangely for a bit, then falls into a line, is it over? I quantified daily the wonder in the grain. I found I was over and singular yet many, the many and the singular, the many and the evolutionary, the many in the grain. Many more. Who in hell am I writing for? This vision is silly, teenage, and mine, a spot on the negative, a hole in composition. I quantify, I loaf, I wonder, I find, I rev. Here the days’ mud, night is a satellite, and anger, my cleft, my birthmark and star. Anger might be a better way to say “I love you,” truer than “how are you in space”? Are you cold, can I get you a blanket? To the polestar I leave my alien regalia, my off-world headdress. I leave acoustic forms in time, blooming, sudsy, inconsolable. If you are unsatisfied, then welcome. Here there are people working every corner of every inch of grass. The meticulously arranged outside reminds me of ocean and feels old. In space the letterforms “I love” oscillate in waves. I lose myself in waves speaking the half of me that forgot to say “goodbye” when I meant to say “how come.” Memory continues to bloom. More songs about death and dying, songs of inexperience. More songs about being and loss, being in loss, more songs about seeing and feeling. If you are critical, all the better to see and to miss it, to misunderstand, to fail at empathy and love, to not understand love and to love, to be diseverything and to love, whatever. To mercy I leave whatever.

Taut with longing You must become The god you sought— The only one

A childless, futureless road And then nothing. . . Is that it? Or start believing in a God Beyond the temporal limit Of westering skies, wide, melancholy, Uncut fields and paced-out walls As we drive towards it slowly, The house that has us both in thrall. They are gone, now, the hours of light It took to get here. Might-have-beens, Lost wanderyears. But that's alright— We are trading it in, the seen For the experienced, the car keys For the end of the journey, When distances have lost their power And the heart beats slower In tomorrow's cold, a coming weather One degree north of yesterday. High latitudes—as they say, There is nothing up here But wind and silence, passing clouds, Light diminished half a tone, A dish left out all night for the gods By morning turned to stone. So take a right, go down two gears And stay in second, where the church is And the pig farm. Only the approaches Are terrible, only the years, The getting here, which takes forever. A boy in tears, a barren crone On a bicycle, a man alone— They're waving. . . It's now or never For the final self, I assume— For the shape of the house On the skyline, the release Into childhood, and the coming home.