Holy Heathen Rhapsody (4 page)

It might have been the million stars

on that night coming down silently

from their dark notches in the sky, bringing

with them only the light of fire, no flames,

no heat, no brimstone, and hovering there,

scattered through the swales and woodlands,

filling every space in the twining branches

and foliage of the forest around us.

Or maybe the sassafras, chinkapins,

and willows, the hollys, rushes, and wild

wheat, once every thousand years put forth

at midnight small buds of light lifting

and blinking like their own hearts in time

to the beat of the solstice. And we

were their witnesses.

Or perhaps it was a fleet of tiny invisible

ships, a multitude bearing flickering

lanterns on their masts, vessels launched

by beings searching the night's deep

current for their missing gods.

Or it might have been the black-winged

beetles of the order
coleoptera
,
those fireflies

gliding slowly, almost floating, through

every space in the forest, above the dank

debris and murk of the earth, into the upper

canopies, igniting their wild bioluminescences,

each one throbbing with passion, drawing us

like spirits into the insect art of their being.

Yet, maybe those pulsing lights—drifting

low over the cow ponds and empty clearings,

pausing in among the forest corridors—

were the chantings of a peculiar prayer.

Had we been able to transcribe that shifting

syntax, decipher the counterpoint, join in with

the canticle, we might suddenly have become

ourselves—the lantern, the budding light,

solstice and wing,
time
and the
once upon
.

On the surface, it appeared

to be an osprey, a white-bellied raptor

with spiny talons, sentinel in its cottonwood

tower above rumbling water.

But diving suddenly, plunging hard,

it became a rapier splitting

the firmament with a deft slicing,

the sky slit through and falling open

from throat to navel.

Flapping then with wet frantic wings

through the breaking ripples and rapids

toward shore, its heavy silver catch held

tight in its claws, it was a messenger

clutching proof, dragging salvation

twisting and thrashing, out of the deep.

A fish, like time set down on a shore,

looks only two ways—one eye backward

toward life, the other forward toward sky.

I know an alchemist who is a churning

river transforming the heave and plummet

of light into the treadle of fins and gills.

In these moments this afternoon, god

is the sure glint of a flank below water,

and summons well; god is an osprey's empty

belly and receives with appetite; god

is fish spine and gut and relinquishes all.

This text seems right for a rushing

river full of gullets and bones, for its multiple

voices ring also with lies and devotions

that pitch and fall and swallow one another,

constantly present, suddenly lost,

all inseparable.

I know I said I loved you,

but I was drunk at the time

on citrus ice and marmalade.

I know I caressed the open places

where your petals join together

at the stem, but you just happened

to lean my way in the breeze,

into my hands already cupped

and blossom-shaped.

Maybe it seemed to you I reflected

the color of your grace in my eyes,

but it was evening, remember, the sun

sinking, and I was looking west.

And perhaps I did sing to you

of unfolding fringed petals

delicately crumpled first in the bud,

but it was really the unwinding

orange nub of the early evening

moon that I described with such rapture.

And if I did whisper to you once

of damp stamens, mesmerizing leaves

deeply lobed, spicy oil pockets

of seeds, those were merely facts,

a dull litany I recited in my sleep.

I don't know how you could think

I came of my own accord to lie

beside you all night in your sway.

I was only your imagination.

Don't ever believe I wrote these words

for you:
In those tangled, moist woods

and thickets where I live, there grows

native and rooted deep in the desire

I myself invent, a divinely aloof,

double orange glory.

In love with the body, especially when

it dances in love with its own dance as it toes

and taps . . . flickers, creepers, chickadees

around a tree trunk, a click beetle in a flipping

somersault, the soft-shoe swish and sway

of the chee and feather grasses, the lissom uvas;

in love with the melding of the body,

especially when it languishes in the surf

of its own sleep . . . the belly slump of a leopard

stretched high on a branch, camouflaged,

leaf and fur, the tight sleep of a tumblebug egg

in its buried pod of dung, the man in a backyard

hammock slowly rocking with the slowly

rolling sun through evening shadows;

(so floats the sea otter on its back, bobbing

with the rocking sea, so bobs the gelatinous

umbrella and stinging strings of the jellyfish,

jelly and sting being the design and event

of the sea's own rolling body)

especially when the perfumes of a vigorous

body rocking, sleeping in the sun's evening

rest are of the salt of the sea, his body itself

being the salt of the earth, in love

with my mouth when the salt is tasted;

no ardor surpasses a body on the hunt,

halting abruptly, one foot lifted above the snow,

poised, as intent as frozen air, eyes as pure

and sharp as ice, then the bolt—the élancé—

beat and soul wholly in pursuit—the sail—

supreme the contact—most foreign, most

familiar, on the far edge of the horizon.

Some people, injured or frightened, rock

all day long holding their knees to their chins,

on sofas and wooden benches, in beds,

on bare floors, rocking as if they believed

they were trained riders on pearl stallions,

or golden-seeded stem-swingers in autumn

fields, or, with their eyes closed, believed

they were flowing purple flags in a sun-

warmed wind, convinced and comforted

by their own rocking.

Mary rocked a grown man dead in her arms,

and Lear swayed with Cordelia-gone held

close to his heart. Did they believe this old

motion performed long enough might

bring breath back? Or did they rock to ease

the loved, lapsing body into the earth?

Or did they rock to give their spines

and breasts a healing expression of grief?

Lullabies, cradles, rocking chairs, hammocks,

long rope swings—a need of the body seems

calmed by this motion of surge and release.

There's someone I want to take into my arms

tonight and rock, his head on my shoulder,

his lips at my throat. I want to move with him

easily, as moonlight rolls and rises on an open

sea, move with the same slow push and pause

a trout uses to tread snow water, the same delve

and release of a bird's tongue in a flume

of honeysuckle. Sinking and returning over

and over, I want to go with him backward

into the balm of stars, forward into the bible

of sun, swing through and behind the blind

bone mask together, out and beyond the cold

marble eyes, crossing and crossing back with him

in my arms until the name of any crossing,

the fear of any crossing, ceases to matter,

ceases to be, fall clear to the bottom of a death

with him, then rise together, saved by

that motion, and made whole, and restored.

It might be possible to disregard

the silent hiss of an open-mouthed

possum immobile on her silver back

in the forest leaves, and it might be

possible to view with indifference

the kite-like ears of a doe

hesitant at the edge of a sallow

muskeg, or the white, fleeing rumps

of over-the-prairie pronghorn.

Some people might never notice

the mating finch, the crimson

chimmer of his call, and some might

find it easy to dismiss the heaving

ribs of a spiny lizard at pause,

one forefoot raised, easy to pass by

indifferent to the ruffled blur

of a sage grouse rising

from the dusty brush.

And I can allow that not everyone

should be impressed with the unbalanced

and beadled claws of the ghost crab

or the multi-doored mound of a single

banner-tailed rat.

But the eyes met straight-on—

whether coyote yellow or sizzling bird-

bead of black metal, whether the tilted

study of gleaming lizard grain,

or the clear gray marble of seal,

or the dark unflickering candle

of fox—the eyes, nailhead-tenacious,

star-steady, searing as salt, unrelenting,

fierce pinions from far foreign realms,

surely no one can ignore being thus

so found and fixed, so disassembled,

so immediately redefined.

We are vulnerable to blindness caused

by the absence of light: snow-filled fog

along a frozen river at night, smoke stack

smoldering black clouds across the sun,

a burlap sack pulled over the head, fastened

with rope at the neck, eyes open inside

searching the weave for any pinpoint of day.

Death can happen by such blindness

when the lantern begins to flicker and dim

deep in a cave, fades, fails, and one is crawling now,

hands and knees on damp rock. All the cells

of the body—gut, fingertips, ends of the hair—

are straining to see. The nose sniffs for light.

King Harold II was blind to death, killed

by an arrow through his eye.

Once I saw a blind girl come to her door,

who couldn't see me as I stood on her lawn

watching the gray in the center of her brown

eyes, who, inside her blindness, saw in the stillness

how I held my breath to stay unseen, both

of us staring, susceptible to the absence of sight.

It can make the mind crazy to think of it:

how the generous light of the sun can penetrate

the eyes like a searing sword so harshly

brilliant that it creates total darkness, blinding,

cutting and killing, at the same time, sight

and the source of its own name.

Some, though having no eyes, are not blind.

The mimosa is not blind to the sun, leaning

upward toward its travel all day and also not blind

to the rain, swelling at its coming. Each blind

leaf partners with the eyeless wind.

Blindness is considered a virtue

in Justice, who has eyes we've never seen.

In a moment last spring, I was so vulnerable

to the call of a courting finch high on the roof

that I held in my hand unseen

not the bird but the sound of the bird.

The spiritual are susceptible to what is seen

in blindness. Closing their eyes, they can see

the cleaved stone in the spiral of the dayflower,

the green seed in the voice of night. Sometimes

they see (and therefore believe) the blind

god of the beginning whose closed eyes,

upon opening, created light.