with each branch of my royalty,
whatever I touch exploding—now—with value
new to itself, no longer just itself,
rare fingertips’ bequeathal! Could I guess
embellishing the plain, my precious vice,
would leave me starved for what is ordinary,
would leave us ruined, whoever shared
a meal with me, whoever I might hand
a thing, or lay a palm on, kindly, warmly?
I can make a surface glitter. But I can’t
drink or eat. No ladle of river water,
no crumb of bread or ripening autumn fig
brushes my lips before it strikes like lead,
each bruising gulp a new coin in the void
of my stomach, a hoard of grandeur
harder to bear each hour, undigested
and contrary to flesh. I languish
for the lack of what seems common: a tomato,
a simple root from a clump of musky soil,
my wife’s familiar breath. What worth is worth
if it closes me from life? I lower myself
to the floor and watch the awful beauty
creep in circles radiating out
from where I sit, making a sound
of cracks and splits as it transfigures tiles
like a fleet of molten serpents lashing
from my still-lumpish flesh along
the floor into the blooming garden
where my wife bends now, clipping vines…
I see her gesture slowly as she sees
—too late—the alteration climb
from soil to overtake her body’s standstill,
a metamorphosis that kills
as adders’ poison does. She can’t escape
without ripping her leg from her own ankle,
and so must freeze there, horrified,
as it crawls to fossilize her flesh,
her sex, her mother’s milk
and then—slowly, at last—entraps
the small pulse of her throat, stopping her breath,
her mind that still beats tinnily in its cage
till all thought’s wings are smothered…
But I move too fast, imagining that which
hasn’t happened yet. Why does what weighs
in the hand and gleams before my sight
turn into a tyrant? How I want
to take one soiled and gardening hand
of hers from the dirt and kiss it! She absorbs
what light falls on her body, doesn’t glow
as cold and as unfeeling as my opus.
Laurel
after Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne
The man leaped lightly through the fields,
an arm’s length from my heels. I felt my feet
burning, lifting bits of wrenched grass—chunks
of dirt, pebbles, root clumps—as I lunged past
where I had been, each former green harbor
abandoned. Air rasped in my ears,
whirred through the bristling foliage
that crowded my path, sent out spikes
and appendages. Twigs and leaf edges
scraped me, drew stuttering lines on my skin.
Through the blurred, varying canopy
I glimpsed a sky riven to pieces, slivers
of its blue patina like a broken vase,
the thing I’d looked up to, all its shapes
wasted; soft, blowing forms—horns and sheep
and goats, billows of noble cloth, bridal veils
—marred by the dimming fringe
overhead. Shadows and light climbed
my skin as if witted, racing over
flesh to some end—but what was it—
complete blinding white, like a temple?
Darkness of Persephone’s throne?
Little bits of both flecked my path: broken
poses, scattered fundaments.
Each pound of my heels struck like needles.
Each foot dribbled blood
but I kept pushing, through one scrim
of branches to another, arriving
somewhere that was only on the way
to more evasion. I ran toward me from his
outstretching hands, a me that bloomed
in the distance, as if my self were the goal
all along. I heard him call:
Apollo. He pounded and glowed
behind me, his name flung through the narrow
scope of our flights, the air filled
with leafy ligatures and long, strangling vines.
I follow. He drove me from groves
calling “sister,” “sister,” “beloved”
as he flattened the fields. I looked behind me
to see the gold-spattered skin
of a god, smell the fragrance of honey
a swarm I witnessed when I was a girl:
all momentum and hum
and restless needlings: a thunderous colony
of bodies: cacophonous wings.
I had been sitting on a log, had moved away
and then seen them: exactly in the place
my body had been a few seconds before
as if to inhabit the air still rich
with my breath—as if my previous presence
formed a portal, a sudden arch
for arrival. It was like this with Apollo:
each place I’d been was opening to him
even as my steps fled, the air emptied of me
ripe for his existence. Escape
belonged to me, and he wanted that too.
Apollo, the cloying smell:
the pound and call: his want. I hoped
the landscape would bury me,
that I could slip into the background,
as if into relief, the flat place
around those outstanding ones, icons raised
on white portals. Father, father, protect me…
Then the bark gnarled up between our limbs.
Then the hair he craved coiled to leaves.
He supposed me a surface, like a river
he could embark on, a fleet of waves,
silvery and involving…reveries
I hindered or interrupted, snapping fresh
tendrils midstretch. Now we are caught
like two stones. I wrench into branch,
my nerves numbed. An umber rush
floods my skull, and my mind
dulls and hardens, entrenched
with gold sap. Clenched, but freed.
Dropped questions, dropped fluidities—
The clefts in my hands splay to leaves. White
roots from my toes pierce cold ground.
No man will pry loose this body.
No god will wrack what is mine.
Suggestive Grove
These trees strike me as musicians, bent
toward one another’s notes: one leans
to catch a strand of melody or the refrain
strummed on a mandolin. One hunches
vigilantly, displaying, with clenched silence,
that he’ll be joining soon. One to the left
gestures to the rest to urge them on,
claps his hands and nods in duple time.
I see their creviced faces, how they mark,
without a word, the supple indications
intimate to them, or linger, poised,
as if this were about attentiveness
instead of making noise. Maybe it is—
just an intense abstraction, as they sway
in unison, or crane to hear new strains
begin, to understand what has begun
so they themselves might enter. Something
like faith encompasses them all,
something like faith or piety. They can’t
conceive of ending it. One’s shift
o
r surge of merging notes belongs
to each of them, was part of all their thoughts
about the notes before they played a song.
To improvise is contemplation’s voice.
Woman in Front of Firelight
after a painting by Franco Mondini-Ruiz
This was a different light, but still familiar.
She felt illumined and she felt afraid
—serpents of color lashing through degrees
of ambience, heat. She knew their streams would fade
to ash, that their beauty would decompose,
like a passion that blazed into display
then dwindled, and there was a little sadness
to this hard truth: she lived in a world
where such lush burnishings arrayed
only a moment before they smoldered.
But now, enfolded in a pause
of orange flamboyance, even though its cause
was material, finite (unlike feeling),
she felt her life drawn through her eyes
toward some liquid body, rimmed in wings
beating and beating, that would not lower her
down to time. There were many things
outside this room she should remember,
that she should be turning in her mind
for these kindled minutes, golden, rare…
but thoughts left as she watched the fire.
Intoxication at Carmel-by-the-Sea
There was a wish to alter consciousness.
—Of course, there always was. We poured
half orange juice, half Beefeater, in two glasses,
pinched our noses and quickly gulped it down.
The mixture in our throats and bellies burned
then shifted to a silvery smooth glow
that radiated through our hands and faces.
That was the sweet part. But the rest was sour.
(For years I couldn’t stand the smell of gin.)
Experience was our experiment.
We snuck out my low window to meet boys
and loll around the unlit, empty town,
down to the sea, if we had time to spare.
Its slosh of blue, its steady, vagrant hum,
mirrored our own inexact momentums.
At thirteen years, my grades were plummeting
but life had opened up, to people, air,
and landscapes tugging me from home like tides.
The gin thing didn’t last. Intoxications
one after another were identified,
tested and tossed. What moves me, from this distance,
is how we fell so hard for everything
that drew us in: the pure, straight sentiments
driving our actions, even to stupid risks.
We were unused to being tentative,
the careful step. Yes. I remember most
that spirit of our trying, which is lost.
Horizontally, I Moved
I let my raw voice rise
but I was chastised, asked to hold my tongue.
I couldn’t see the scenery for wings.
What good is blocked out paradise?
And hour after hour to hear that
pallid music: dull, facetious
words repeated to the same
sweet harmonies, like the manna that rained
constantly to feed us.
—I was bored. I tore a feather from one wing
and laid it on his throne, blood tipping
the quill. God found the trifle
and spent light rifling feathers to detect
a spot of loss. So I confessed:
I’d pulled it out for no good reason
except my discontent. He threw me
violently into chaos. Wracked with soot,
my lush wings locked;
now I could only lower myself slowly
and sink until I glimpsed reflected rays
in one thin strand of river through the garden.
This seemed a lasting shape
so I chose that for my seduction’s
body: sinuous bolts with skin like waves
of water. Horizontally, I moved.
2
Hadean Time
It seemed, now seems, a boundless continent Dark, waste, and wild, under the frown of Night Starless exposed, and ever-threatening storms Of Chaos blustering round, inclement sky; Save on that side which from the wall of Heaven, Though distant far, some small reflection gains Of glimmering…
—John Milton, Paradise Lost
Hadean Time
The old stars exploded
and a grave new light began to form
in accretions of dust,
their metalled leavings.
Things broken and molten tumbled
uncontrollably, collided with the stars’
lost pillars at varying speeds. The initial
burst at the center faded.
By emptiness, some was consumed.
There was a big breather.
There was a time of great reduction,
of tossed and dismembered stuffs
and the frail light turned on itself,
folding inward, destroying most all
of its mass. It could have disappeared.
Then a huge flare fueled
by near-destruction rosed the ruins.
Scatterings of the old order,
once dispersed, drew together
with pulses and contractions,
many surfaces, many directions.
After all these pressures,
amid much spouting of gases and smokes,
you remained, trailed by your past
through piecemeal space.
You were fresh still, too fresh to trust,
the globule of an exploded triumph
soft with failure, not strong enough to carry on.
You could have been nothing,
could have been merely a mistake.
The essences shifted. The liquids rippled.
To be flat or brilliant or in between—
Even fact, before everything happens,
has no firm shape.
Dark Ages
With the oldest bodies of light
we can see shreds of beginning matter,
what came before
there was any light at all
and, in that vast state
gusts of fog, mist, grayish gases
thinned to ribbons and strips
vaguely reigned. This was genesis
not quite free of her past.
When the earliest stars appeared
one by one, each illumined
clump and flame-hoard forged
a distant fate. Some
warmed awhile, then waned.
Some grew hot over time.
Some drew a molten fortune
from whatever lit remnants they could,
reeling faster. Some lost control
and flailed to fiery tentacles
clutching backward—they left visual shrieks.
Those with a future in emptiness
bulged from a self-scalding core
but rounded their own reactions
in the iron of perfect spheres.
Their blue-red lesser fires
brightened to white heat, white as an eye
looking out on terrain unknown,
still clouded. These were the eyes,
just opened, of the seer shocked
to recognize such distortion, such lack
of clarity. How much still to be done!
Thus chewing the matter over
another, and another, was born
in a chain of increasing vision.
Each new gaze broke the grayish drifts
afresh. The background shifted its bits,
the foggy veils dissolved
in widening rings of heat
as stars, suns, other brilliancies
(like eyes as
well) resolved to burn.
Eventually, the seers cleared
this place of ambiguity
or portions of it. They made it an active black,
colder, but seeded with galaxies,
composed of bright and dark,
night and day.
There were chances for cosmic wrecks
but for substance too, and order.
Now, shreds of those first mists
occasionally pass
across the oldest source of light
more potent than a billion of our suns.
If we look hard and fast
we can see them.
Farthest Flame
Whatever you are comes from the sun.
It is useful to remember this
as you go around chasing days.
The sun is not round.
It appears so because its geometries are burning.
It cannot have a fixed shape
because its edges are lopped by flame.
Clipped, cut, carved in a moving margin
peaked with fluid fire. Fire that is no color.
Fire of such wild roil it kills the idea of color.
Fire the idea of which is only a beginning
to your mind and its elliptical frames.
This fire is your reason for being,
the reason itself, and in it nothing rests,
nothing lives or breathes
for millions and millions of miles.
The sun has many tongues
it flicks coarsely, it flicks loudly.
Its eruptions are violent, a violence its own change claims.
It can swallow its own disturbances
on a blistered surface curling to the core
yet send out signals through the cold of space
ending gently, many millions of miles away.
It has a light touch, this fevered origin
after, long after, it leaves the place
repetitive, terrible, where dark is eaten
again and again by panicked tongues,
where the fire and its tongues eat darkness.
The Iceberg
The iceberg moves will-less
through shades of gray and gray,
a tower of clouded glass
seeming proud of isolation, rising
in air. Or the iceberg’s top lies
flat along the water, its misshapen
turrets jutting below the surface
like an upside down, Gothic cathedral
made of ice.
Around the tower and its moat
or the inverted iceberg, or tipped cathedral
dipped in the green-black liquid and remote
in mists (if you could stand in the middle