Hammered Dulcimer Read online

We are light, we are light, dream the fish

  as the water rings out and away.

  Since the darkness will flood into me,

  I will rise and give birth to myself.

  Oh what veils I'll remove as I go!

  thinks the moon. She has thrown off her grief

  and is able to shine on most nights,

  then returns to a river of doubt.

  Those below her must travel with care.

  They must follow their stream to the end.

  They must follow the stream of their listening . . .

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  and the grey light is full of invention,

  and the soul rides the question, its string

  in the musical night. The soul rides

  on a frail and invisible thread

  or a sound. How it twists in the air!

  laughs the moon, looking pale, looking wan.

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  A Story of Swans

  The young girl's description of swans

  is the story of swans that begins,

  ''As the cool lilies cover the water,

  as a mellow sun gilds the wet banks,

  the young man and the woman hold hands . . . "

  Not the story that, glistening, rises

  with algae and mud on her skin,

  that is scratched by rough sedges and weeds.

  Not the story where mirrors come in,

  where a lack of them, in the pond's surface,

  keeps wisdom from seeing her face.

  Now the serpent, the subtilist creature,

  lurks deep in the body of hosts.

  I could tell her about the white raven

  turned black for its criminal tongue,

  for its shrewd and dividing intelligence

  and the depth of its throat, like wild space.

  How its feathers were too dim to last

  in the air of such space. But her swan

  is eternal, with calm, dipping suns

  and a castle beyond. The rare swan!

  When it floats, it floats holding its wings

  firmly down. And the fermented gold

  of the sun pours a mead on its skin,

  on its feathers, those odd, ancient flutes

  that will ferry grief out and away

  through the qualms of each figure, the myths

  of each word that encircles the pond.

  Will you enter? The pond is obscure.

  There is something about empty space

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  the mistake of a hollow that charms her,

  that tempts her. She peers into holes,

  any hole; a cement crack, a drainpipe.

  I watch her. She bends lower. Squats

  to consider the back of that throat.

  When you lie on your back in the dark

  you will hear it come breathing, come breathing,

  the fear, not the one you adore.

  When your doubts rose, it rose. It had seen

  you grow soft, like a powerless swan.

  I could tell her about the young prince,

  the bold son of the sun king, who begged

  to take off in his father's fierce coach

  wanting fire of his own. How the horses

  who carried the light were confused

  and flew higher and higher, afraid.

  He fell terribly free of the coach.

  He fell flaming and far into water,

  and his cousin, who hated the fire

  and the heat that devoured his young friend,

  spent his long days lamenting near green

  and cool waters, near flexible reeds

  and sad willows, near bank-blossomed fruits,

  searching, searching the ground for a mist

  to dissolve in, until he was bent

  and just lifting his feet. So the swan

  that would always love water, loathe heat,

  grew from thisfrom this grieving alone.

  I could tell her the story is clear:

  That the swan is a flowering grief.

  That the swan is a terrible clamor.

  Sorrow's face. Or the infinite stretch

  of the infinite loss of first pleasure.

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  One who knows underneath it is hollow.

  One whose wings cover serpents and hosts.

  Will you float? Will you circle the pond?

  Will you enter the story yourself?

  I could tell her beneath the dull waters

  where fins, purling muscles, quick gleams

  flash the dark, there's the body of dreams.

  To be wise is to know many sorrows,

  is to know many holes where you stand,

  to unearth the dark cry under feathers.

  To be wise is to know many fires

  pouring over the flesh, the small soul

  on its quest. How the quest burns the whole.

  And the sun, the high sun, lets it happen,

  lets us rise in the rose-colored dawn . . .

  but she flies from my shallow reflection.

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  God Put the Noose around My Neck

  I stood trembling and shy

  on a chair of this world,

  stood there, poised in between

  my own life and loose space.

  "Love" the bent shadow of him

  adjusting, adjusting,

  with purposeful hands

  the contraption of threat.

  "Love" the tying of knots,

  fingers oiled in their skill,

  the sharp hinges of elbows

  framing dark work,

  the tense forearms like hills,

  and his breath in the distance,

  that sole, vivid warmth.

  God the sad, God the ghost,

  all bravado and edges

  in the place between things.

  I could tell he was nervous

  when he touched my life tenderly

  under the rope,

  when he kissed my soft throat

  after looping his threat.

  While I carefully stood

  on a chair of this world

  a hair's breadth from loose space.

  You'd think God wouldn't do this,

  that I'm somehow disgraced

  by such wicked imbalance,

  by the rope white as bones

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  snaking close to my face.

  But I saw through his act.

  I saw God's human face.

  It was bound up in mine

  and it needed my willingness.

  How far would I go

  to uncover my faith,

  to discover my life,

  the sheer weight of the self?

  It was good not to fall.

  And he tightened my throat

  with the length of his fear,

  to the shape of his want,

  and he pulled at my soul,

  tugged it this way and that

  But he couldn't reach through

  the tight web of our difference.

  He knew this, and wept.

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  The Grasshopper

  It is a cunning thing:

  woven, it would appear, of grass blades

  and large as a hand, its hymn

  some vast, internal drum.

  Antennae waving at the newest sound

  it bristles when I approach

  as if the wall inside my house

  were all in the world

  to lean on. I imagine

  a soul is like this: driven

  to feel narrowed, more acute

  in a chosen exterior,

  some grumbling carapace.

  It waits, pristine as glass,

  a wordless, hardened angel

  with marble, all-seeing eyes.

  How do I catch the spirit

  then set it free intact?

  Now my jar snags

  a recalcitra
nt leg, the insect foams,

  flails curious dimensions,

  and, when "freed," limps off

  grotesque and frivolous

  against the grass. Maybe

  some liberation lies

  in being out of place, out of a home,

  movement itself should be a home

  where error has a space . . .

  but I'll fixate on the gleam.

  Am I its host?

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  Or does it, green and surly,

  unhinge the luminescent world,

  this papery self that leaps and leaps

  until a broken leg or wing

  (mauled by the usual downfall)

  looses it from the body

  and it can really spring.

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  The End of Spring

  There is betrayal in such sudden change.

  We do not own it, this froth

  of heat drowning our efforts,

  making us frown at the day's complete,

  exhausting utterance. Minute

  after rayed minute rains down,

  on the sidewalks, in the corners of rooms,

  in our throats, and we are too tired

  to take the change apart. We give it a name.

  Summer, we say. The end of spring.

  Flowers like lost grips,

  dried and slouched with disappointment.

  Birth crawled into a crevice.

  Wasps flying through window cracks, withered, enraged.

  Last week, something raised its head

  and wild winds rolled

  from the Blue Ridge to the pine-covered hill

  behind my house

  downing three pines over it. The broken trees

  we chopped and hauled away,

  polishing off the initial mess

  with carefulness. Every season

  shreds the deeply appreciated

  flares of the last.

  Destruction. Creation.

  There is no good way to distinguish

  between the two. And our art isn't much different.

  We like to pretend

  it stands clear, but it's always in flux.

  It moves. It falls.

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  It is. The weather of the world,

  the weather of the mind. It finds us.

  The way two goldfinches,

  the male with his black angled hood,

  the female brownish and earthly,

  return to my garden every afternoon.

  The way their species,

  elusive, yet too well-known,

  threaten to flicker my every poem

  with the usual cliché,

  though I have yet to catch their sublimity.

  I promise myself

  I won't let them in, but what can I do?

  I can't fight the refrain,

  what returns to the setting,

  returns to the poem,

  and does not grow tired of the vast, enduring

  background. I'd guess

  that is poetry:

  not flight, but things coming back

  where they're wanted, comfortable

  haunts

  of detailwhile the rest, the god or goddess,

  the uniform reign,

  lingers behind, never known

  in its entirety,

  heavy and gray, burnished and green,

  a tapestry so prevalent

  we hardly see it,

  the monstrous "yes" that does not change

  slipping over the hills into our hands,

  our feet, our eyes flooded with what

  could be peace

  in the star-flecked night.

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  In the Abstract

  Slowly, slowly, slowly,

  a red hawk circles the blue sky.

  "It is a meaning,"

  I could say, or "It is matter,

  the form." But that would be

  disingenuous.

  How a word

  soars from us, leaving

  the mind open, the mouth empty.

  Or, alternately, how it stabs at

  the small distinctions

  on land, conquering

  deep untidiness

  shallowly. So my guess,

  placid and many-hued,

  doubles the blue

  distance, which is almost all

  slate.

  So it falls.

  If meaning were flight,

  would it be so perfectly honed,

  would it be such an instrument

  of departure,

  such a private chariot

  of feather and air?

  And what would that meaning

  find, the one

  we can't touch, clear and sure

  of its path?

  How it would swath

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  through the blue shell

  of absence, not even a cry

  could reach, not even a cry

  on the highest of hills . . .

  Oh well. If I

  am not careful, the meaning's

  lost. Maybe

  it is what appears to be

  most vulnerable

  to loss: a word

  and its history, its freight,

  the wing that lifts

  our eyes to see beyond sight.

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  Ambivalence

  It is hard to believe

  as alive as we are

  that on certain afternoons

  say this one, with its gray streams of light

  into corners of rooms

  and its mild open air

  and its orthodox cries

  from lowest heaventhe soul can wander

  to and fro

  without knowing what to do,

  can be heavy with longing

  without longing for,

  and the feet can carry the body

  across floor after floor

  without going anywhere

  beyond their own plain action.

  Then there is no satisfaction.

  Then yearning, in fact,

  may be all we can find.

  At such times, the heart wants

  To draw back? To lie still?

  We can't tell.

  The flesh holds out its hands,

  two lumps of desire,

  silver in the fallen light,

  tarnished with rifts, portents, years . . .

  They can bear no answer.

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  The Chant

  Why can't I sing myself awake

  when darkness falls, when darkness falls,

  or bring myself to brightly make

  a difference to my dragging soul

  since differences, as we've been told,

  are those that we ourselves create?

  The crickets know a constant beat

  in pointed grass and shadowed hill

  as silence threatens to repeat,

  when darkness falls and fear unfolds.

  There they are, hunched and chanting still,

  an independent opposite

  to all the rings of quiet black.

  But I can't simply rise and break