a stork's beak tracing in air,
awaiting the feeling of fins underwater,
as still a gaze on the ground before prayer?
Or sighting and limning a lightness with ink,
and draping the blankness about as a veil,
eyes shining with secrets revealed,
and voice cradling verses inhaled?
How often the first voice is silent,
and in silence we raise up our own.
Is anyone speaking? Or do we just hear
what is and is all and alone?
John Darnielle [c. 1997]
You came down from heaven to the branch outside my window.
Your feathers were the color of snow.
The dice were loaded against us ever seeing each other,
but one of us had nowhere else to go
In your eyes were all the colors that the rainbow forgot.
Your wingspan was four foot wide or better.
With your voice practicing notes from time's own beginning,
you took apart the alphabet, letter by letter
And here, where it all stops for good,
where the cool waters run,
thought I saw a mouse kicking in your beak,
it was only a skeleton
I found this poem "I" wrote. Old photos are easy enough to look at now — the "boy" in them is always someone else, not me. In the secret place where I used to hold bottomless grief and hate for "him," now there is sorrow and compassion, because I know how ashamed and cut off "he" is. Each old poem, though, comes with imprints and echoes of "his" desperation to escape "himself." The best of them hold a little gleam of the light that kept "him" sane for the decades spent in that dark little hollow.
I didn't always write them well. Fair enough. I've already removed most of the pieces I didn't think had any merit at all, but I gave this one a second look and read the line I'd quoted at the end (without attribution — "mysterious" as usual). I had to look it up. Tolkien? I never liked Tolkien, but it was a good line. I re-read the piece in light of it.
I don't know what the title and opening lines were supposed to mean. You'd have to ask the author, if you could find them. My guess is the imagery was meant to allude to crossing an event horizon and muse on some convolution of spacetime. That seems about right, and it certainly didn't work.
Rereading is the most important work we do as human beings. Through it we perpetuate and adapt — our DNA, our youth and histories, our community and laws. As time and progress move us forward we pivot to face that eternal centre, compasses seeking the pole as we're dragged along the azimuth.
I've given it a new title as it pivots to look in a different direction from a different place toward the same origin, and kept the lines I thought mattered.
was there in this a
seed hatching in the fruit?
And in the blank behind the season [ ] wasnthere.
Wondering your gravity...
or the equivalence of the distinct principles
that must be the same, but only in a
small enough space
and your form always escaping forever
into form
—
"And far away may find a land where both our hearts may rest."