Holy Heathen Rhapsody (5 page)

Mangy bitch, emaciated,

old scavenger, pocked hide, warty

muzzle, one hip lower than the other,

she came to him by mistake (sent

by the Mistake Maker) straight

from the African plains

in a crate marked
The Unsightly.

Cur-crone, she knows everything

about following lions, those regal

rumps, at a distance. She knows

about cowering, circling and circling,

the dart-in, the rip, and the snatch.

Snarling, ears back, half charging,

she's put to rout, in her time,

many worrisome vultures

and carrion crows.

By the neat nip of her teeth,

she's pulled fetid strings

of maggot-infested flesh

from abandoned hides;

once existed for a month

on the putrid marrow

from a wild boar's corpse.

She's lived in even leaner

times, leaping and munching

on lizards, grasshoppers,

and grubs.

Her eyes have seen the evening

sun setting on the Serengeti

from inside the boney cavern

of a fallen wildebeest.

She's called with others

beside a kill, yelped, howled

for murder's sake in chorus

all night long on the starless

grass sky of the savannah.

Forager, tenacious scrounger,

scarred, crippled

by the hooves of kicking

gazelles, she knows

better than anyone else

what kind of god it was

who left the pure white bone

of the moon picked so clean.

With scab worms and billy-club knots

on her rear, she's here—Thief, Felon,

Mongrel Messiah—beside the blind

beggar for good.

And now when his sustaining

visions of bonfires over water

come only dimly and rarely

when his fingertips harden, tough

and numb as leather and his beseeching

talents fail, when all sighted

angels face in the opposite

direction and there is no one

in that dark and frightening

paucity who sees

that he does not see,

then with his hand on her head,

she can lead him down these alleys

in the way he has to go.

no sound above a nod,

nothing louder than one wilted

thread of sunflower gold dropping

to a lower leaf

nothing more jarring

than the transparent slide of a raindrop

slicking down the furrow of a mossy

trunk

slightly less audible than the dip

and rock of a kite string lost and snagged

on a limb of oak

no message

more profound than December edging

stiffly through the ice-blue branches

of the solstice

nothing more riotous

than a cold lump of toad watching

like a stone for a wing of diaphanous

light to pass,

as still as a possum's feint

no message more profane than

three straws of frost-covered grass leaning

together on an empty dune

a quiet more

silent than a locked sacristy at midnight,

more vacant than the void of a secret

rune lost at sea

no sound, not even

a sigh the width of one scale of a white

moth's wing, not even a hush the length

of a candle's blink

nothing,

even less than an imagined finger held

to imagined lips

After a freight train lumbers by,

hissing steam and grumbling curses,

metal screeching against metal, it passes

into the night (which is the empty

shadow of the earth), becoming soft

clinking spurs, a breathy whistle, low

bells clanking like tangled chains,

disappearing as if on lambskin wheels.

Something lingers then in the silence,

a reality I can't name. It remains as near

to a ghost as the thought of a ghost

can be, hovering like a dry leaf spirit

motionless in a hardwood forest absent

of wind, inexplicably heraldic. It is closest

to the cry of a word I should know

by never having heard it.

What hesitates in that silence possesses

the same shape as the moment coming

just after the lamp is extinguished

but before the patterned moonlight

on the rug and the window-squares

of moonlight on the wall opposite

become evident. That shift of light

and apprehension is a form I should know

by having so readily recognized it.

After the yelping dog is chastened

and a door slams shut on the winter evening

filled with snow and its illuminations,

someone standing outside in the silence

following might sense not an echo

or a reflection but the single defining

feature of that disappearance

permeating the frigid air.

When all the strings and wires of the piano's

final chord are stilled and soundless, the hands

just beginning to lift from the keys, when the last

declaration of the last crow swinging down

into the broken stalks of the corn field ceases,

when the river, roaring, bucking, and battering

in its charge across the land, calms its frothy

madness back to bed at last, then suspended

in the space of silence afterward, may be

a promise, may be a ruse.

They float and sweep. They flicker

and unfold, having neither electrons

nor atoms, neither grasp nor escape.

Like skeletons, they could be

scaffolds. They are visible echoes.

Like scaffolds, they could be memory.

When of cattails and limber willows

on a summer pond, they are reverie.

Layering each other in a windy

forest, they can cover and disfigure

a face to a puzzle of shifting pieces.

If straight and unwavering when

crossing grassy lawns and clearings,

they are measures of time, true

of direction. The shadows

of minnows on the creek bed below

are either darting ripples of black

sun over the sand or reverse reflections

of surge as fish, design as soul.

They bring the devices and edicts

of winter, of spring, into the house,

over walls, ceilings, staircases—

the inside motion of a blossom falling

outside, a bird beyond the window

swooping a passage of pure flight

through the room. Shadow-drops

pearl over sofa, table, books, replicating

rain lingering in gold among leaves

and branches at dusk.

I sit on the floor within the shadow

network of a winter elm, its architecture

spread across the rug. The substance

of this structure is less than the bones

of a bumblebee bat, yet it holds me.

Some shadows are much esteemed,

those of canopies, awnings, and parasols.

Many ancient tales record sightings

of ostriches seeking the black relief

of cloud shadows on the savannah,

following them across the treeless plains

like magi following the holy star.

Maybe the metals of meteors, the drifting

remnants of galactic debris, the ices

and gravels of disintegrating comets

in their orbits cast showers of tiny pale

shadows (like spells or blessings or praises

upon us) as they pass between sun and earth.

With no fragrance—neither spicy, sweet,

acrid, nor mellow—without sighs or summaries,

without an aim of their own, like wraiths

and ghosts with no heft of any kind—the sole

matter of shadows is lack. Disappearing

in darkness, they depend for their being

on light. Therefore, they cannot be evil.

Some people still do not believe.

Sound with the cries of Rachel's children.

Moan over empty hillsides and river runnels,

among the broken stones of abandoned streets

and fallen fences, through empty channels

and sharp-ledged ravines resonant with echo.

Rasp and rattle with the integrity of a perfect

reckoning down the metal roof onto the splash

pans of gutters, down the pipes of open sewers.

Snore skywide with sporadic mumbles.

Rumble from your own soul sources.

Stutter erudite nonsense, a stentorian

preaching from high altars, pellets clicking

and tapping among the leathery leaves

of oak and hickory in the upper towers

of the kingly forest.

Is that the giggling of lost Peter and Aaron

pattering on the cold lake's surface?

Speak, an eloquence devoid of message

in the silence of floating fog. I'm listening,

the voice sinking among the invisible

blades of the morning marsh.

Tarry awhile in the dark, humming the sleep

and lullaby common to that far place

from which you have come.

In retreat, challenge slowly in single words

striking randomly:
now,
and now,
now,

now and
now.

In the dust, spit large rounded vowels.

Our Father, who is the Passageway in the tunnel

of the worm and the trench of the mole,

in the wintering eggs of the luminous beetle

and the ragged reachings of all roots scraggly

and crooked with the network of their knitted

inroads, who is the Deep in unseen subterranean

rivers, the Porous of limestone, sandstone,

and gravel through which groundwater seeps

to purity downward, the Sunless in buried aquifers,

and the overpowering Weakness in the single cell

enormities surmounting there, who is the Source

and Savior of the eyeless eel and the eyeless

pseudoscorpion and is the Blindness of the eyeless

eel and the eyeless pseudoscorpion, and the rigid

Seriousness of ancient cave chambers, echoing

caverns, and catacombs, damp stone spires

and walls of granite organs, the Light of calcite

pinnacles which, after touched by sudden light

in their lasting darkness, emit light themselves,

dimly, briefly, who is the seething core Intensity

of molten metals, the center Clench of solid

iron/nickel fury, who is the complete Circumference,

each and every inner Radius of orbital earth,

hallowed and empirical, who is the Story

and is the Telling and is the Silence beyond

forever. Amen.

Rain comes in its minions, streaming

down into ravines and rimples, running

over and under bedrock and boulders,

down the slopes of gulleys, sopping

mossy dells and frond-filled valleys.

And snow, without blizzard, colorless

with silence, floats to earth, gathering

across plains and lowland forests, covering

the smallest flat pads of weathered

mushrooms, filling the upturned hulls

of spent pods—yucca, locust, pea, mimosa.

All of these seek the earth.

Spiders drop too, sometimes sailing

in hatchling clusters, gliding through

a still day on streamers or blown

sideways over fallow fields until

the wind ceases and they settle

in the bristled grasses and mayweeds.

Whispy seeds of ash and maple aim

for it, each balanced with the wind on double

paper wings. Every direction points

finally toward earth. Acorns, walnuts,

hickories split away, plummet hard,

knocking through tangled twigs

and branches to get here.

And geese zero in, whiffling and skidding

feet first to a lake-slide landing, skimming

in praising sprays of water. Watch.

The earth is so desired. Coming

as close to it as possible, consumed by it,

white toads and blind fish adore the deep

of its internal damp, foregoing color for it,

relinquishing sight. The inert seek it too,

bone splinters, fleshy crumbs, nasty orts

and roughages sink through sea currents

all the way down to its bottom sunless bed.

The heavenly—angels, arch-angels—

deliberately descend, perching and hovering.

Their choruses sound then like broken chords

of wind strumming through pinyon pines,

like the dodecahedron ring of icy chimes

hanging in crystals from winter eaves.

With all the vast freedom and void

of the universe to select from, frigid evil

comes too, seeking warmth in the belly

of the lover, power in the birthright of the sea,

spring light in the pulse of the prairie.

The earth is so desired. How its rock

and river body is loved, its dune and hillock,

its night and day demeanor. Even the dead—gone,

buried, and forgotten—take its name forever.