Rock Harbor (2 page)

seen it

             always, and not

looking? Was I meant for

a vessel? Did I only

believe so and,

so, for a time, was it true but

only in that space which belief makes

for its own wanting?

What am I going to

do with you

                     —Who just

said that?

Whose the body—where—that voice

belongs to?

                   Might I turn,

toward it, whinny

into it?

             My life

             a water,

             or a cure for

             that which no water

             can cure?

             His chest

             a forest, or a lush

             failure—

Even now, shall I choose? Do I

get to?

Dearest-once-to-me

                          
Dearest-still-to-me

Have I chosen

already,

                or is choice a thing

hovering yet, an

intention therefore, from

which, though

late, could I hurry back?

What am I going to do with you—
or

how?

Whom for?

                    If stay my hand—where

            rest it?

THE DEPOSITION

Whether it more was like

the ocean,

or more

those plates in the earth that

shift abruptly according to

laws that, even if I

give to them here

no name, apply

nevertheless outside, in

spite of—

I forget,

as so many somewhere always have

just said. Exaggeration,

to say I never thought

I'd lie among them; more exactly: I

had not hoped to. How

brief, comparatively

at least, that

feathered phase—

less Roman,

more Greek, more

birch than

ash, none of shame's

nobility attached, but—

worse—the embarrassing

thud of blunder, to

ever have laid

the blue-to-black,

black,

then blue

familiar of self full-length

and down, ringside, as if there'd been

a ring, or as if by

long traveling at last done

in, as who would

not be? I

had not guessed it.

As when to find a stone

is to find revealed

no truth unless the truth

of stones, which

is to say the fact of

themselves only. Or

as when the song

of wanting is understood as

not at all the song of

being wanted,

not like thirst,

not like hunger,

not the disappointment

of only the one leaf gone

vermilion inside of

the tree's saffron majority,

not a godlessness in

the wake of a habit of prayer, neither

that sort of wind, nor a tunnel, or through one, it

was not like that.

TWO

BY HARD STAGES

All the glories—

ribbed, and

separate,

                   collective

sway-in-the-wind.

Shut them.

                    To have wanted

more, where has that

carried me,

                    if what

so much matters

now can be proven

later to all

along have been doomed

not to?

      •

            The governing

drift was from

sensation to

                      distraction to

irrelevance: “they came

to nothing,” it says here,

“en route

settling for things like

heat falling mostly

against, light mainly

falling, between them

a bush or

                    a skull

shimmering like another

example of absence of

will—with

heat only,

shivering—”

      •

                      Do I make

a difference? or

What is it

                   so persuades, I

must make one?

The text breaks like a road

forking where none

warned of …

Look at yourself,

Look at you.

                      Have I not

looked there—

possibility for

—into it?

                 How small,

      •

without effort almost,

can be the leap from

it-is-findable to

we-have-found-it.

Though not water,

not the flash, even,

as if off of that which

could be water, could

also not be—

                           To have

called it water. “They

crossed themselves,

they gave

utterly themselves over

to what

               wasn't there,

that it might

save, or drown them…”

THE CLARITY

No dream—but as

if so, moving at first

with the force of

idea purely; and

then of a man convinced

he has justified

brilliantly himself to

himself; and then

of the yearling that,

haltered at

last, remains

still to be gentled, to be

broken-to-ride, although

no yearling, not a horse

ever, and not dream.

I turned.

I could see,

across the room,

heaped there like fouled

linen like memory like

detritus stepped

away from, the truth of

—of myself: glintless,

yes, but no

more so for my having (how

long?) disavowed it.

Suggestive of sorrow,

or the cool irreversibility that

attaches commonly to

larger mistakes

of judgment—so did it

lie there: undiminished.

I take it, in the darkness, to my face.

LOOSE HINGE

Of the body: most,

its resilience, have you

not loved that, its—its

endingness,

that too?

And the unwitting

prayer getting made

between them,

as when we beat at

what is closed,

closed against us, and call

the beating, in time,

song. To have been

among the hands

for which the stone lets go

its sword,

or the tree its gold

crepitating

bough,

what must that

feel like? With what speed

does the hero grow

used to—necessarily—

the world's surrender

until—how

else—how call it

strange, how

not inevitable? Heroes,

in this way at least, resembling

the damned

who are damned

as traitors, some

singing
We could not

help it,
others

Fate,

Circumstance,

X

made me
—as if

betrayal required more than

one party, which it

does not.

Admit it: you gave

yourself away. We are

exactly what

we are, as you

suspected, and—

like that—the world

obliging with its fair

examples: rain and,

under it, the yard

an overnight field

of mushrooms,

the wet of them, the yellow-

white of, the

nothing-at-all, outside

themselves, they

stood for. You've been

a seeming

exception only. Hot;

relentless. Yourself the rule.

THE THRESHING

A sweetness, say—

and coming, on me. Or, in

almost-squares,

light dismissible at

first as that which,

surely— Did I

dream that?

Between

what by now lies far

behind, and what

ahead still, gets

forged a life that,

whether or not I can

recall having

called it mine own

—or say so

now—will have been

the case, notwithstanding:

as when a smaller

fate, this time, fumbles

clear of one larger, flies

free, how the usual

questions—is this

nature? design?

whose?—

alter none of the

particulars of escape,

of the being foiled.

If the world is

godless, then

an absence I am

always with, and

it with me. Or

else the world is

stitched with gods and

unavoidably I am

with them,

they with me.

To be reduced to

nothing, literally, but a life

to lose; to surrender

that, also, to those

whispering
Yes, yes,

that also
— Isn't this

the idea? To give, even

full well knowing that

they might take it,

they might not, their

gaze—as if by some

city more new

and glittering than

the last one graced

briefly then lifted

out of—their gaze

distracted.

Point at which

who seeks, with the

swerveless patience that

hunger, for a time,

affords, shall find

his target—stilling,

stopped. No room

for wanting. —Was this

not the idea?

The hands: as if only

made for this—

Should the eyes not

be, already,

shut,

then you must shut them.

THE SILVER AGE

Naturally, the lawn fills

in, where you

repaired it.

Of the two

trees left,

one dying,

the parts of the tree

across which disease gets

laid, like a map,

out,

and the other parts,

putting forth still their

late, bright,

October buds—berries—

which one?

                    What's to

stay for, in a slow

drama whose end we know

already?

                 This morning,

it seems impossible,

that question, to have ever

asked it,

that I did not

always recognize

a pleasure—

baroque,

acquired—findable

only inside the particular

chord that an ever-building body

of evidence

makes, finally,

with the very fact it can't

help but

lead to.

               After which, though

a bit surprised where,

before, was hope, or

doubt,
We suspected

as much,
we say.
We knew

all along

what the light would

be like—

a grazing

weightlessness; what

leaves, in turn;

sprawl of the sleeper's

legs

his chest

his face

TO BREAK, TO RIDE

That, nightly,

some blooms fold,

some open; how

the opossum at the same

hour forages the same swatch

of yard; and the moth,

a shadow, all

over again navigates

more shadow—

There's a knowing born

of conquering;

conscious at first,

or never, reflexive finally,

a mastery of pattern,

how a thing changes—

light,

a difference in it,

an absence of—

the better to mark and

react in turn to

when, of a sudden, pattern

stops: where

is danger?

what is safe? This

kind of knowing, it is like

a ladder. It is

scales, in music:

though I believe that the earth

rotates, what I

notice more is

the moon appearing,

what I'd rather

remember is another

story—concerns a boat,

routine, the bearing

away of one

brightness, the fact

of others,

smaller, more of. How

still, beside me. The difference

between us the same as

that between a garden

shaped by patience,

attention,

plan,

and a field to which

an unexpected heat in late

October brings

now the worker bees

confused, instinctive,

back. If a sadness

to it, then

a sadness, one that

no more lets me go than

I let
it
go. It is waste,

to worry. We shall never

be more close than we are now.

ENTRY

As if an ark—

or,

like one, how slow …

How it does not seem

to leave the shore or

want to so much as—more,

whatever it must, already, it is

letting go.

On the water, a stillness that

should not be