Holy Heathen Rhapsody (3 page)

When we meet now, we meet always

at dusk to play. The hard sun soothed,

easing off, is a mere sky of placid sea,

a pale plain of dimming blue and dun.

Even against the forest of walnut,

sassafras, and scrub oak hedging

our court, I can see his silhouette clearly,

as if he were a distinct piece of night

broken away, the sureness and potency

of night taken shape and set before me.

I imagine a greeting.

I serve. He receives. We play.

He's quick, anticipating me, meeting

each volley squarely. The
thonk
of the ball

found and sent speeding back and forth

is a smooth, fulfilling pleasure in the body,

as keen, as sweet as the swallow

of warm bread dipped in vinegar oil.

My aim determines his position; his return

predestines mine. I like what I become.

I adore his reckoning. More than once, I want

to jump the net and take him down. Pin

his shoulders. Kiss his face. Our game

is more than memory and prophecy.

Gradually the screen of trees dissolves,

disappears; or else the night expands,

absorbing the spaces inside each vein

and limb; or else the forest and the night

switch names, trade places. I lose sight

of him among the cast of stars.

His return comes from farther

and farther away, the thrust of the ball

sounding more and more of shadow,

its journey back to me a longer

and longer message. I can still judge

his angle, still hear the nuance

of his strategies. I know his study.

I dart forward, swing high,

send the next ball back with all

the might of my several minds, watch,

listen, ready in my stance, wait

for as long it takes.

Approaching two handspans from dusk,

he is an infinitesimal fraction of the day

concluding. As he looks west, his shadow

lays a line pointing due east. His spine

is as straight as the walking staff he carries.

He strolls through the center of a grassland,

seed-headed weeds and wild rye swirling

around him in a gold glinting wind. He walks,

as well, within the memory of a circle of fish

he once saw similarly swirling, a living ring

flashing silver in a silver sea.

He is three degrees northwest of madness,

three steps beyond glory, standing alongside

a bank of sunflowers up to their necks

in madness, up to their necks in glory.

He passes through a coordinance

of fragrances: yarrow, nectarine, salt,

a vagueness of myrrh. The presence

of his place is validated by a yellow-headed

blackbird who watches with its one

appropriate eye.

Reflecting an angle of attention, he pauses

as he attunes to the sounds of insects

chirring in the weeds of a rain-filled delve.

For a moment, he is located both inside

and outside his vision of finding that storied

baby hidden in a basket among water-filled

weeds and the sleepy strumming of crickets.

Would he take the infant up in his arms?

He gauges in the same way the spreading

branches of the fig tree calculate. His face

equals the sky he surveys. He enters the night.

He is more than the darkness as it dives away

backward now toward the soundless roar

of the stars appearing from all directions.

It could make a person dizzy,

those spinning, circling heavens filled

with knots of stars, swirling blue

stars approaching, blue-shadow stars

fading away. It's a mayhem of reeling,

a scattering blue dust of star clouds

circling the circling centers of spiraling

galaxies wheeling forever toward no

known horizon.

Someone, immersed

in the deep beauty of these blue celestials,

could get lost while waiting for hands

to deliver perhaps an orange, perhaps

an apple, scarlet or gold, a sprig of green,

a blossom, pink dogwood, spring plum.

Inspired by
“Golden Horn” Tondino
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Texas

We feared this most in those days:

the black moon in a white sky.

On waning nights the glossy black

gleam of this moon's beauty inching

toward the west was a ponderous

pearl too heavy to admire.

During the nights of its fullness,

however, there was no lunacy

in the black moon but a lunar pall

pervading the countryside, touching

every hearth and field, as they say.

Any soul, inevitably so entered,

succumbed to that dearth. Remember

the wearisome wringing then.

And the hooded witch flowers

spawned by this moon in the damp

of midnight were no lilies. White

moths born of their black seeds

were the art of those blossoms,

foreboding their theme.

We feared the endless depth

of the black moon, the impenetrable

entryway to its wide-open tunnel,

the paralyzed swallow of its toothless

mouth. Is it true, an abyss can create

shadows of energy? We often found

dreams in the threat of the black

moon, in the same way as we often

heard voices coming from the empty

sockets of the graveyard skulls.

The black notes of the black moon's

music penned on parchment were

as vacant as the black dots of the stars

seen in their constellations against

the white night of the black moon

For the comfort of nostalgia, Maestro,

here is a coin. Play again the dirge

we danced to in those days.

The screeching cries

of the killdeer in the night create

their own narrow channels through the blades

of broken grasses and sharp-edged

dunes lining the shore.

Likewise,

the nightjar's whistle cuts a passage,

like a stream, across the open desert.

Only the nightjar knows the stars

of that passage, just as the limpkin's

wail is a direction only the limpkin forges

through the marshlands.

The furrows

of the field cricket's triplet chirps and shrill

courtship trills transform the sorrels

and doveweeds in the ditch, fashioning

needle ways and grids of space by the run

of their own notes.

And the thin cough-bark

of the bobcat establishes another sparse and arid

stalk among the rocks and brushy land where

it roots and withers.

No one can fully explore

the corridor made through the dark by the coyote's

jagged shrieks and clacking yaps, those yelping

howls like sheer descending cliffs, a noise

jumbled like rock-filled gulches and gulleys.

None but the coyote.

On icy plains, the snowy

owl occupies the cavern of its own silence,

a cavern formed by its quest for sweet blood

of lemming or hare. Within the polished,

black-and-white crystals of the freezing

night air, the owl watches from the warm

hollow of its stillness.

The inner eye of the Cat Goddess recites

without pausing the blood verses of foraging

mice written beneath a snow-covered field.

The Basking God of the lyre snake, red-

bellied snake, and blue garter snake

is explaining the coil of the galaxy.

The Upside-Down Creator of the nuthatch

descending the tree headfirst in circles

is willing the sky and toe hooks to hold tight,

and they do. Seers and Soothsayers are casting

lots at midnight to determine which beetle—

the elegant checkered, the nine-spotted

or two-spotted, the willow leaf, whirligig,

or harlequin cabbage—will be Lord Inheritor

of the Following Day. By her shifting, soaring,

rearranging, and scattering wisdom, the Prophet

of Autumn Winds makes visible the art

of the atom. And the Composer of the Sun's

Radiance is conducting the chords, the keys

and harmonies, of colliding ices and cold celestial

showers, flowing molten lavas and metals

and all migrating herds and tribes. She counts

the measures of the evening rains murmuring

like sleeping birds, numbers each single note

in the shimmering stanzas of Saturn's rings,

in finger cymbals, temple bells, and carillons,

and—there too—in the cadenza of the white

rose worn behind her ear.

except for the smallest white button

of mushroom leading the rank-and-file

up the rotting trunk of the oak, except for bulb,

corm, pip, and spore and the passive mien

of the autumn field when the off-kilter

scatter and skyward rattle of grasshoppers

have disappeared and except for the crowd

of acacia thorns pointing toward all destinations

possible in every direction out from the stem

center of their circumferences and aside

from the moss-and-mire covered bones

of stripped roots and crippled branches left

piled akimbo to molder among the beetles

in the sinless murk of the forest floor,

except for gorge, gulch, gully, and ravine,

except for the moment waiting in the fist

of the sycamore's tufted fruit and in the sting

of the loon's longing before it cries

and in the poise of the desert swallowtail

before it lifts from the dry mountain

wash and in the aim of the alligator's

undeviating glare before it swirls and sinks

in the generative and ancient slough, except

for the moment waiting in the green walls

of palm spikes, pendants and rosettes, knots

and currents of saw grasses and orchids,

in the tight weave and bloat of prayers

and weapons, in the moment before I move

out into the empty plain of the open sky silent

with sea-light, as if I were a wild and divine

thing myself, to be going I know not where.

Verses 6–10

6.

Deer passed the day quiet in this unmown

meadow. These grasses pressed to the earth

are the beds where they lay.

7.

My nose to the earth, I followed

the passing of the field mouse weaving

through the wheat grass, leaving seed husks

where she stopped to feed. I sniffed

the rank marking of the weasel's

passing on a rotting stump, rolled

in the scattered twigs and shell

remnants remaining after the passing-on

of the kingbird's nestlings, looked up

to the sky-scent and cry of the red-tailed

hawk sailing past overhead.

8.

Remember the only purely good man

to walk this earth? It could simply be

a wish contained in his myth that gardens

of tiny ferns, roseroot, and calamint,

meadow rue, white blossoms of baby's

breath, sprang up in the hollows

of his footprints, wherever he passed.

9.

A thin scarf of clouds draws itself slowly

over the face of the moon as the moon

passes over the stars and disappears behind

the arches of a stone gate, itself passing

with the earth through midnight and heading

toward the home that is morning.

10.

Like daylight passing through gold

glass beads stretched across a doorway

or the scent of wine grapes passing through

a latticed arbor or a feathering wind

passing through willows beside rippling

water passing through their shadows—

so a spirit, a ghost, a goblin, a god, created

and palpable, passes through every word

written, spoken, sung.