Holy Heathen Rhapsody (2 page)

The sun is a total green of light

inside a single mimosa seed riding

inside the sky-green and river-

green of its buoyant pod canoe.

A black tern holds its feet flat

against its body as it wings

through the green skies and currents

of an earth winging through sizzling

star celestials. A ship, a speck

passing by above on the green

undersurface sky of the ocean, has no

notion of the volcanic flow seeping

from a sizzling crack in the earth

miles below, the only line of light

appearing on the ocean floor.

It could be a frond of fern sizzling

and spooling, unfurling its green

wing within the current and wake

of the day, the only frond of fire

appearing on the rain forest floor.

Remember the eye of the tern,

a speck of sky in which rides

for this moment the full wake

of summer and its green currents,

the spool of the sun in its dawning.

It could easily be a shawl of light

placed around a woman's shoulders

as she rests beneath a mimosa,

unaware of a seed drifting high

above her on the green undersurface

sky of July. See how the green fronds

of the rain unfurl, spooling away

in the ocean's current. Look again.

A crack appears across the universe

of a buoyant pod. The first throb

of the seed's green fire is dawning.

Once I saw a field of bluebonnets and fiery

paintbrush so solid with flowers it seemed

to be a surf and sea crests across which a ship

might sail petal by petal like a shadow passing

across an otherwise unbroken evening.

And I was the field, blue crests, stem

fire and surf. I was the shadow ship.

I was the evening passing. Everything

there in those moments was as inseparable

as the rhythm of the sea is inseparable

from the words of an old chanty sung

long ago by seamen inseparable

from a time no one now remembers.

At the shallow edge of a pond, I watched

an underwater nest of floating jelly-pod eggs,

a translucent, swayable heaven holding a thousand

eyes, bold dots of black, all seeing with one

flawless sight, and I was their vision.

I remember flying a summer migration,

each of us the flock indivisible, headed north

to breeding grounds. Paradise: our silver

feathered bodies, hearts and bones, solely

identical, all separate calls one single

sound emphatic. Our open wings were

the wheel and purpose of the sky turning

the earth exactly like the stars do.

That leaf indistinguishable—or that one

or that one, each magnificently anonymous—

is bound as an entire mountainside of autumn

aspen. Each yellow spinning is the piece

and the whole of the standing forest—alone,

unique, synonymous—moving with the Moving

that moves the aspen-altered wind and me.

A weaver, this spider, she plays her eight thin

black legs and their needle nail toes across

the threads faster, more precisely, than a harpist

at concert can pluck the strings in pizzicato.

Although blind at night, she nevertheless

fastens a thread to a branch of chokecherry

on one side of the path, links it to a limb

of shining sumac opposite, latches the scaffold

to ground stone and brace of rooted grasses.

And the structure takes dimension.

Skittering upside down across and around,

she hooks the hooks, knots the widening

spirals, the tightened radii, orbs and hubs,

bridges and bridgeheads. We can never hear

the music she makes as she plucks her silk

strings with all the toes and spurs and tarsal

tufts of her eight legs at once. She performs

the reading of her soul.

Oh, remember how vital her eyes, the eyes

of her gut, eyes of her touch gauging the tension,

her eyes of gravity and balance, of purpose,

steady eyes of reckoning. Don't miss

the moment when she drops, a quick grasp,

catches, swings forward again. An artiste.

She expands the sky, her completed grid

a gamble, a ploy played on the night. The silk

is still, translucent and aerial, hanging in a glint

of half-moon. The work is her heart strung

on its tethers, ravenous, abiding.

Listen . . . all white foxes, all white owls, all snowy

silver geese. Attend . . . all casual fish holding on

in the icy beads of a silver current. Snow leopards,

white bears, silver baboons, mottled white mice nosing

at autumn seeds . . . pause in unison, lift your heads.

Still your wings and heed . . . silvery blue moths fluttering

like flakes of moon. Long-haired, spike-horned goats

on precipitous cliffs, white spiderlings floating

mid-cloud . . . take note and remember.
Each barb

of every feather, every black-tipped ivory hair, every

luminous scale and fan-like fin, each knuckle of spine

and nail, each red drop at the pith of the marrow,

at the root of all glare and mettle,
every breath quiver,

every one, every single one, is beheld and declared.

I don't know if Jesus ever walked

in snow, through a storm of snow

blowing icy pieces stinging against

his face, in his eyes, snow melting

and freezing again in his hair until

it hung in stiff cords on his shoulders,

against his forehead. I've never seen

him pictured that way.

I don't know if he ever witnessed snow,

Jesus the Christ wrapped in robes that couldn't

keep out a winter wind of the mildest kind.

He would have had to swaddle his feet

and sandals in layers of cloth to walk through

the snow of a mountain pass, using his staff

along the narrows of slippery rocky paths.

Once in a May storm, I saw a hummingbird

hovering momentarily outside the window,

caught in a late spring freeze and snow-filled

fog. He was tiny iridescent feathers of green

and rose. He was a flittering bead of living color

taking off against the gray monument of winter.

I wonder if people would have followed

Jesus, climbing a mountain through the snow,

gathering around him there to listen, the wind

screaming its own beatitudes, whipping up

sudden gusts and shifts of snow descending

again over them like night. Hooded,

crouched down close together and sleeted

with snow, they might have resembled

a flock of sheep huddled on the hillside.

Once I saw a work of art lying abandoned

in the hoarfrost and snow of a forest clearing,

Van Gogh's
Starry Night
lying frayed among

the stiff and rattling grasses, that deep swirling

blue sky of bursting suns and splitting stars slowly

being buried by pearl on icy pearl of drift.

He could have told them the parable

of the blindness of snow-filled fogs

and white-outs, or the parable of the linking

prisms and patterns of any single flake,

or the parable of the transfiguration

by snow of needles, thorns, and jagged

stones. The breath of his words might

have been seen as a holy ghost of warmth

in the paralysis of that killing cold.

I don't know if Jesus ever witnessed snow.

It may never have snowed in Galilee,

although it is written that he rose

to heaven in “raiments white as snow.”

Anything could appear to me here now,

walking in this obfuscation of snow and fog,

a true blizzard, if the wind were swifter.

Totally veiled, I move on legs I can't see,

parting endless screens and doorways

of chilling silk and ice-threaded smoke.

A black swan might float before me

at any moment, a hand's breadth

from my face, emerging suddenly

through this solid alabaster, a swan

so black it's a mere vacancy of bird,

a perfect absence of itself. I could easily

proceed, entering the fall of its body,

its wings spreading into their own deep

hollows as it vanishes with me.

And it seems altogether probable

that a white wagon hung with ivory

orchids and pale ferns and pulled by white

sea turtles could pass silently

above me, trailing slithers of pellucid

flying fish and ribbon eels twisting

through swells of icy dust.

Many crippled angels attend me here,

hovering on all sides. My breath,

the same color as this storm, floats

through their snow-filled wimples, swirling

their gauzy pantaloons. Coming in and out

of existence as I touch them, they regard me,

holding their muslin canopies over my head,

reciting prayers of blindness. In my vertigo,

I posit these angels now, not as beings,

but as fictions of time creating

the framework of a necessary place.

This dizzy loss, this dizzy loss is the same

loss, the same gain as dancing slowly

nowhere, eyes closed, with a boy I remember,

a boy who draws me closer, taking me in,

as a winter landscape filled with drowning

seas of descending snow takes in

and transfigures all previous boundaries.

Just now a christ with white eyes

touched my face. I felt the drift

of his hand across my forehead, his fingertips

brushing with Braille lightness once

along my cold lips blessing thus aloud

each and every one of his missing bones.

It has its places, in the grains of frigid gray

dust on the moon, in the descent of a barb

of feather lost from a jay, in a rasp of leaf

released by the sky and sinking to winter.

Distinctly present in a stone hand lying open

on rubble, in a clear glass marble embedded

in place of an eye, in the shorn hair of dead

women taken for wigs, it is itself and actual

across hillsides before threatening thunder

begins, in hollow, in cavity, in null,

on the surface of the lake where the heron's

wavering reflection lay before the heron rose

and disappeared. It is there in the workings

of wind around isolated spires of rock, through

abandoned trestles, picking at the rotted wooden

beams of condemned bridges, there among dry

tares and tarweeds, in any shard of buried

pottery, any crust of insect hull, any fragments

of crushed shell spilled like splinters of bone

thrown for dice on the sand, as the sun's dark

light in the east at dusk. In the steady haunting

waiting here and now, it is replicated and fact.

as an easy wind circumnavigating the land,

spreading slender grasses, their tawny sheaths

and dry bristles bending and swinging

in my wake, or lifting seeds, the keys of white

ash, the cottons of white poplar, carrying

their promises within my boneless presence;

to be a gusty wind in winter, an airy

cloud of resurrection raising the fallen

snow, surging skyward off an open hillside,

a swirling spiral of icy light circulating

within me like blood;

to bring the native fragrances of ripe

orchards, vineyards, and cedar oils,

the fecund damp of mountain rain forests

into the streets of the city, becoming myself

the odors of sweet perfumes, frying meat,

and liquors, the yeast of loaves rising

on their racks, smoke and steam my allies;

to give to the august and muted needles

of the piney woods sounds harmonious,

to release chords of voices inside the spires

of red rock corridors or make visible the art

of light in motion on dew-covered vines

of morning glories, or bestow leaping

pirouettes to languid dust of abandoned roads;

to be an easy wind smoothing the skin

of a lake at dusk, barely touching its radiance,

to pass over those waters as negligibly

as a shadow passes over the eyes, as silently

as the spirit of deliverance passes over each night

without notice, soothing, barely touching,

the hands and brows, the lips of the sleeping;

it could be grand—an eternal breath like the wind,

transcendent and old, to be in death always

ancient in the way the wind is always new.