Love the drill, confound the dentist.
Love the fever that carries me home.
Meat of exile. Salt of grief.
This much, indifferent
affliction might yield. But how
when the table is God’ s own board
and grace must be said in company?
If hatred were honey, as even
And, the last day being come, Man stood alone
Ere sunrise on the world’ s dismantled verge,
Awaiting how from everywhere should urge
The Coming of the Lord. And, behold, none
Did come, — but indistinct from every realm
Of earth and air and water, growing more
And louder, shriller, heavier, a roar
Up the dun atmosphere did overwhelm
His ears; and as he looked affrighted round
Every manner of beast innumerable
All thro’ the shadows crying grew, until
The wailing was like grass upon the ground.
Have but one God: thy knees were sore
If bent in prayer to three or four.
Adore no images save those
The coinage of thy country shows.
Take not the Name in vain. Direct
Thy swearing unto some effect.
Thy hand from Sunday work be held —
Work not at all unless compelled.
Honor thy parents, and perchance
Their wills thy fortunes may advance.
Kill not — death liberates thy foe
From persecution’ s constant woe.
Kiss not thy neighbor’ s wife. Of course
There’ s no objection to divorce.
To invent the alef-beit,
decipher the grammar of crows,
read a tangle of bare branches
with vowels of the last leaves
scrawling their jittery speech
on the sky’ s pale page.
Choose a beginning.
See what God yields and dirt cedes
when tines disturb fescue, vetch, and sage,
when your hand dips grain from a sack,
scattering it among engraved furrows.
In the middle of December
to start over
to assume again
an order
at the end
of wonder
to conjure
and then to keep
slow dirty sleet
within its streetlight
Terra Firma
The King asks, “Tell me, what is the highest meaning of the holiest truths?”
The Seer answers, “Emptiness, without holiness.”
The King is a restless seeker.
The Seer is a ruler and thief.
I am seriously watching how trees are always missing some leaves.
They sweep the air looking for them. Nothing distracts them. Nothing.
Where leaves are missing between the branches, beautiful sun porches,
which disappear when the tree reaches them.
“Who are you?” the King asks.
“It is not like that,” the Seer says.
Distance brings proportion. From here
the populated tiers
as much as players seem part of the show:
a constructed stage beast, three folds of Dante’ s rose,
or a Chinese military hat
cunningly chased with bodies.
“Falling from his chariot, a drunk man is unhurt
because his soul is intact. Not knowing his fall,
he is unastonished, he is invulnerable.”
So, too, the “pure man”“pure”
in the sense of undisturbed water.
In the suburbs on a bike path that in
any other age would be a road roughed
halfway through some dark wood’ s listening heart
two damp young men in suits sucked dry of light
walk stiffly and uncertain round a bend
in each left hand the black box of a book
They see me then spread out to fill the way
as sun blares down and dry May wind slaps
cheap loose plastic cloth against their shins
The thinner taller blond one greets me in
an earnest tone these days not often heard
and when I do not take his offered hand
Three years, Huang Gongwang
worked on his famous handscroll,
Dwelling in the Fuchun Mountains.
As he put successive applications of ink to paper
over the “one burst of creation,” his original design,
it is said he often sang like a tree frog
and danced on his old bare feet.
One day, he adds one hemp fiber stroke,
the next a moss dot.
What patience he had,
like a cat who comes back season after season to a mole’ s tunnel.
