Those twenty-six letters filling the blackboard
Compose the dark, compose
The illiterate summer sky & its stars as they appear
One by one, above the schoolyard.
If the soul had a written history, nothing would have happened:
A bird would still be riding the back of a horse,
And the horse would go on grazing in a field, & the gleaners,
At one with the land, the wind, the sun examining
Their faces, would go on working,
Each moment forgotten in the swipe of a scythe.
But the walls of the labyrinth have already acquired
Their rose tint from the blood of slaves
Crushed into the stone used to build them, & the windows
Of stained glass are held in place by the shriek
And sighing body of a falling chimneysweep through
The baked & blackened air. This ash was once a village,
That snowflake, time itself.
But until the day it is permitted to curl up in a doorway,
And try to sleep, the snow falling just beyond it,
There’ s nothing for it to do:
The soul rests its head in its hands & stares out
From its desk at the trash-littered schoolyard,
It stays where it was left.
When the window fills with pain, the soul bears witness,
But it doesn’ t write. Nor does it write home
Having no need to, having no home.
In this way, & in no other
Was the soul gradually replaced by the tens of thousands
Of things meant to represent it —
All of which proclaimed, or else lamented, its absence.
Until, in the drone of auditoriums & lecture halls, it became
No more than the scraping of a branch
Against the side of a house, no more than the wincing
Of a patient on a couch, or the pinched, nasal tenor
Of the strung-out addict’ s voice,
While this sound of scratching, this tapping all night,
Enlarging the quiet instead of making a music within it,
Is just a way of joining one thing to another,
Myself to whoever it is — sitting there in the schoolroom,
Sitting there while also being led through the schoolyard
Where prisoners are exercising in the cold light —
A way of joining or trying to join one thing to another,
So that the stillness of the clouds & the sky
Opening beneath the blindfold of the prisoner, & the cop
Who leads him toward it, toward the blank
Sail of the sky at the end of the world, are bewildered
So that everything, in this moment, bewilders
Them: the odd gentleness each feels in the hand
Of the other, & how they don’ t stop walking, not now
Not for anything.