No Ordinary Place Page 2
their sighing just before sleep.
The Restive Angel
I have come from the other side.
I have crossed the field of battered weeds
and discarded tires, of razored glass and despair,
and I come searching for you. I am the voice
of the naked branch scratching the sky,
I am the groaning throat of stars, glaciers
of original light. I have touched the soles
of your shoes and tasted their dust,
I have counted your scars and hear
your hymns of grief. I carry your dreams,
the ponderous and prophetic, weighted
in my arms. I speak them into your ear
as you sleep. Beneath the insouciant moon
I hover in my lonely dress, my moth-wings
drawn to your lighted window, and there
I find you, burdened by memory, chained
by desire, your slow tenacity in scraping pen
against a page as if you chiseled words
in stone. I, who know only peace
and the inexhaustible light, come again
and again to stroke your silvering hair, marvel
at your thread-bare heart, your exquisite pain
here in the lovely, lovely dark.
The Small Gods of the Morning
Dawn, the lynx-eyed moon slides down,
a dim sun in the West,
and the birds
cluster in their nests for the moment
of their rising. That pair of horses
hang their heads and wait
for the night to die its little death.
And the bones of deer and bison lie
beneath their skins of soil,
fluted, sharpened
into what a hand could make
to be of use, render to stone:
an image of itself and of its universe.
The house you wake in sleeps,
just as the one you made
in crayon as a child,
slept on its sheet of white,
a white house, the bright grass
at its feet, the light waking
behind trees holding their breath,
and the small fountain
you have fashioned in a bowl
pours itself out again and again,
one leaf
lying happily at its depth.
The rose you set into earth
has begun to think once more of roses,
and the cats
place themselves at the door
because they know you will step out,
walk down the path singing
whatever hymn you devised
in the furious clatter of your being.
And now the sorrel gelding
rings the bell of the gate
with the hard fist of his hoof
and thus begins his prayer
that you come down
because he knows,
and the cats, raising their tails to you, know
as rose, water, the trees’ stony arms
and the moon, all know.
You are a god, and all your kind.
Always so have you been.
Exile
. . . the Lord God sent them forth
from the garden . . .
Genesis 3: 23
The gates stood open for eternity behind them.
Even at this distance, the angel’s wings flared.
They thought in the hills they might quench
their nagging thirst, but day by day, they grew no nearer.
Ever since the naming, he had been insufferable.
The children, of course, didn’t get along.
She combed the naked ground in search of food,
but whatever she happened upon, they devoured
in an instant. Their hunger knew no bounds.
Nights they huddled against the cold as the animals,
newly wild, encircled with floating eyes,
and the angel’s wings hovered at the cerulean rim
of their horizon, the wilderness grown over
with a loneliness like nothing they could name.
The Darkest Place
Again she has found the darkest place,
where she curls
like a quiet animal, where she knows
no one can touch her.
I find her
the moment I’m not thinking of her,
when I’m occupied with ordinary chores.
Plaid dress, princess collar,
brown clip biting her hair.
I lift her up, hold her on my hip
and say, they are not here now
and cannot hurt you,
and I carry her into the light
where we can have a look at each other,
girl and woman,
ourselves in the face of the other.
We are in this together. I tell her,
see the rain on the window —
how it carries your sorrow,
how those leaves in the yard
have laid their thin bones down —
I place words in our shoes, and we go walking.
Silence. Mouth. Rescue. Heart.
Broken. Mend.
Returned,
we stand in our stocking feet, tossing
each word into the sky,
forgiving each other
over and over.
This Tree
Tonight, smoke rises over Buenos Aires
where the ghost of my childhood
wanders the autumn streets
and breathes the scent of April dying.
I hear shuffling from a dark portico
and know it is my own girl-self
shadowed in a dingy dress,
feet grimed with the city’s detritus.
She has buried the memories
of those whose hands found her
in the night, and now no one
gives away her hiding place.
She is weary of holding out
her palms to strangers. She awaits
a dawning in her heart — the name
she bore when she was a bird
who combed the night and sang
the mornings open —
the name no one knows but God,
the name even she has forgotten.
The sky tosses back its long light
from street lamps and restaurants,
the sky flickers with lightning
but does not sweep the streets with rain.
The little black autos of Argentina
hold their eyes wide as a cat’s
and race through the calles; the colliding notes
of a tango pour like a hymn from an opening door.
Child, I am your mother. Dream the sky.
In sleep build your wings. On fallen leaves
I pen messages for you. For you
this tree have I planted.
No Ordinary Place
I turned to look behind me
and saw the long road of my life.
Now I lead a secret existence.
I fill pages with all the things
I can’t tell to anyone.
They sway like tall pines around me.
The moon climbs among their branches
like a barefoot girl
straining for a glimpse of the sea.
Now the wind whispers
stories in my ear.
It says my life is not what I believed.
It says this earth is no ordinary place.
And God, that lonely child,
I’ve seen him
tossing winged seeds into air,
turning round and round in his bewilderment
as they sail back to earth.
Now I can’t tell heaven from an ordinary day,
or heaven from hell, or my left hand
from my right.
To all my questions com
e answers:
Turn around. Look closer.
See where you have already walked.
And the stars, oh, the stars —
everywhere,
everywhere now, there is singing.
Daily Office
eight fragments
for Cecilia
1
Ripe berry, you,
naked and damp
with birth,
we brought you home.
I held you in the crook
of my arm, your new
mouth yawning,
your mewling cry. Snow
and the frozen
stars. From what far
world did you come,
and did you bring
this loneliness?
2
Tonight the jasmine
blooms for love
of the moon.
Trees, what tears
you let fall, what bells
you toll.
3
We sleep, we dream,
and memory unfolds,
scrapes at the house. The folded,
the unfolded, the life
and the death. Owl,
give away your darkness,
become the moon
and sing.
4
These slow nights of winter,
my little soul opens
and closes her wings.
She is grieving heaven,
her dream, mourning what
has died, what
is not yet born.
5
The light said, “Rise.”
The morning said, “Choose.”
And so I rose and walked
to the sea,
the vast crowds of stones
already gathered.
And the sea, seeing them,
spoke. And the stones
murmured among themselves.
I understood little
but clouds changing
the sky, sea
changing the shore.
6
I fell from heaven
7
Morning grows into noon
and a woman
reads aloud. She knows
the book by heart, loves
the delicate curve
of the words,
little wrens, restive birds.
It’s my voice, that bell I’m hearing.
I stand apart, heaven-fallen,
stranger to earth.
8
Sun’s procession — a choir
of one. Moon’s manna of frost
on grass — oh, what silence!
This daily office.
This awakening to light.
Like I Told You
It’s like I told you, sometimes I live
not wholly in this world:
you know, a person can slip through
the sheer fabric
of what you think this life is made of,
and just because you can’t see it,
doesn’t make it not there —
the smallest tear, for instance,
you step through
that leads
to nowhere you have ever been
and drags you toward itself,
like the afternoon
I stood on an empty road
made simply of earth, the scent of earth
rising to my nostrils,
a few stones scattered at my feet
and no other living thing I could see
to the thin line of horizon,
only a bird
lifting the song she had just made,
new, in her throat,
into the blue shell of the sky,
that seemed to call me to turn,
walk deliberately into a field of ripe wheat,
the solemn and golden heads
full with their own strange music, and I,
walking into it,
the wheat covering me above my waist,
and nothing I could see
but the burnished heads shining
in the sun, reaching to the sky
and the sky
bending down so low
they touched each other, when I knew
something was there —
a pair of yellow eyes, the wild
watching of one who had not been seen
for many years
and was presumed no longer to exist,
and at the moment of my thought,
the eyes had gone,
and there was no hollow in the wheat
to tell me it had come, that we
had beheld each other’s eyes,
and I wondered then
if I had seen it at all,
not another soul in the field
to tell me, too, about the eyes,
the tufts of fur
inside its perfect ears, the stare
that said it knew me
and had known me all along,
and you begin to look around, wondering
where you are
and if you will ever get back
to what you know as the world,
but you do somehow,
because you can’t stay there,
that’s all there is to it,
you must go home
and do the small things you do
that make up your life,
and by doing them
put the day to bed
and call forth the night
in its vast
and unexplainable darkness.
Seeking and Finding
Birdsong
at the window.
A Tallis choir.
And just off the train
reddened with rust,
Dawn —
with its briefcase
and its newspaper.
Now you rise and search
for the poem, which is
the world,
singing itself —
wild, quick-winged,
with its memories
of night, the walking
trees, the moon
whose powerful paw
splashed light
on your forehead
as you slept.
Fence. Branch. Wind,
you say, naming what is
out there,
but find it, finally,
inside you,
little scarlet bird
that has trilled all night
a melody
in all its variations,
quicksilver
as a snail’s trace,
fierce as barbed wire.
Such stubborn music, this
second heart
beating in your chest.
A Table in the Wilderness
for Cherrie
The spoon he lifts to her lips
holds a sun, the soup
I made from memory.
Around the table as we eat,
our arms touch.
We hold her in this net.
She is waiting to climb
into earth
where her room waits,
where the clocks are set
to a different hour,
and many are called,
and many chosen.
She will rise and climb
into the sky,
become a sparrow
with sorrow in her beak,
she will be lamp and shadow
in our empty houses,
will lie down
in the loneliness of stars.
We will search the night for her,
our faces shining, bewildered moons.
Tongue-Cut Sparrow
The child begs for the same story
night after night. She waits
beneath the white-starched sheet
in her bed beside the window, full open
to the caught air,
unstirred leaves of the mimosa.
r /> She pulls the sheet to her face,
sniffs its clean,
and waits for her mother to come,
open the book, and begin.
Beneath the telling, her mother’s voice,
the child wonders why
the old woman cut the tongue
of the sparrow
fluttering among the bamboo,
and so in her days, the child
sings for the bird.
She sings to the old woman
and believes the magic in her singing
will turn the old woman
gentle and sane.
She sings
after her mother closes the book
and rises without kiss or touch
and descends the stairs
of her madness.
The child cups her hands,
breathes onto the sparrow
and holds it to her chest
when the mother’s rage
sends her hiding under the bed,
into the night of the closet,
or high in the downy
blossoms of the mimosa,
and the little common bird
quickens its breath
until calmed in the curl of her fingers.
Always she vows
to protect the bird.
She strokes the timid head,
feels the heat of its sides
on her cheek
and sings, believing
that the song, if sung perfectly
over many days and nights,
will lift her mother
from the black room of her mind,
will lead her into light.