A LONELINESS LINGERS IN BIRDSONG
There’s always a song to sing, but first a silence must be created for the song to be born in—Yoko Tawada
The amnesias of all species converge
in the animal songs we listen, innocent, for;
whales and crocodiles for example are
not so miserably ignorant of
the tender forgottenness of languages
beyond the human, above and below,
gradually inscribed geologically as we are:
is the ignorance inherent in the language
or the linguist, is the limit closed or open.
When Robespierre organized the Festival
of the Supreme Being (June 8, 1794) he knew
the language of the Accused contained no memory
of innocence, but the language of Accusation brimmed
with accuracy and assertion. A new ritual,
in other words, in words neither recollected
nor reflected except as echo, fleet and foreign;
in a new world nothing old is audible.
AFTER JUNKO OKI
You may see two objects side by
side and know they have spent time learning
to decay into life together.
I must find soon
an image—light shining through a rotted roof?—
that I might hold in my last moment. It will be
a comfort to come prepared.
You may see an apartment building after
a fire or earthquake a wall fallen like a veil lifted
plumbing clinging vinelike but floors gone
also people. Maybe a closet door hangs open.
“Old fabrics are just old fabrics—
nameless modest and beautiful.”
A PASTORAL
And to the animals he met in the shade
Said, “You are my melodies, and you are handsome.”
—John Ashbery
What sacrifices we have made to live in a world. this world
for instance. gone as it was given us, or going. stony sleep
behind the eye.
It was a newly ancient culture I joined on my latest birthday.
the ritual simple, merely memory.
And I watched with everyone the walls crumble
while giving shade and shadow and vegetation a chance.
It is a highly textured planet on the edge of its own ambitious
angle of repose. a flattening follows the picturesque, the pretty.
Architecture and other old inventions litter the prairies the
pastures new. never doubt the authority of the ignored.
Drift.
Watch dogs return to their shallow beds their scratching
done for the day, their hours filled with smell and promise and
danger and difficult seeds to dislodge from their fur. dangerous seeds.
The stone returns in the eye. the mind the mineral memory.
Gravity will not relent. the leaf will not fall through the canopy
the column will soon lie prone with all. persons of death and sleep.
The evergreens look upon each other. the tall down upon
the crawling juniperus horizontalis who hugs.
Fissures open. the mind. the mineral sisterhood brotherhood.
categories hiss and spatter and dispute. quarry.
Recognize as the only victory the temporal order of pleasures
propensities organic or other. wise.
For a tree to lie on its side down on the earth there must be
angels to witness and to carry the message the means.
to resurrect.
And one to find shelter for those living among the branches. broken.
And to record of the sound of it happening.
INSIDE VOICE
Western European languages don’t have a term for entities that are like ideas yet exist independently of any mind. “Angel” may be the closest they get
—Jan Zwicky
I am thinking about Joan of Arc. What I know:
she heard voices when the church bell rang the church
is still there but the bell has been replaced so it is safe to visit.
Joan’s mother loved her but suffered. Everyone in France
suffered, not the fault of Jeanne no matter how dark.
I learned all there is about voices and saints
versus voices of angels the inconsistent yet insistent
like peals of bells ranging out into the ringing echoic landscape.
But voices of saints are quiet these latterly days; no one
listening. To be loud is to be ignored my sainted mother preached.
Wearing my little suit to practice silent before the church
I heard my uncle ask my father, Did he write his own sermon?
But I had only the voices like bells in my ears not
yet to reach the brain not yet resonant not to be heard only
waiting in the anteroom of conscience, aware of faces
lining the corridors to stare down at children filing in
from playgrounds keeping custody of the eyes. Tremblingly.
ALTERNATE THEOLOGIES
Linda and I in Gloucester walking watched a gull
pulling a fish out of a drying net the net outrigger raised
net pulled tight to the masthead the bird
persisting. We walked on we returned the bird
still pulling
the fish so out of its element no doubt dead
the gull only breathing not riding the air,
we fleshly witnesses to fish and fowl we watched
the god of the bird is air the god
of the fish, water, yes, but not so simple
the god of both might be the net the trap the hook
which delivers the one into the other’s devouring
we, the couple stand watching
delivered to another devouring altogether slower
air and the water famously the ocean wave
the air pushing past gravity the boundary
a layer molecular of elementals including salt
including nitrogen etc. but flashing scales
of fish fly into the landward wind as if
the intensity of bird hunger flecked into anger
its own god become a god of self and survival.
