Hours after your death you seemed
everywhere at once like the swifts at twilight.
Now your moments are clouds
in a photograph of swifts.
18.
In the hour held
open between day and night under
the meteor showers of Perseid
we held each other for the last time.
Dead, you whispered where is the road?
There, through the last of the sentences, just there—
through the last of the sentences, the road—
THE REFUGE OF ART
I am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments . . . the refuge of art.
VLADIMIR NABOKOV
In an atelier once a shoe factory, an artist paints walls,
cromlechs, and cairns with pigmented stone-dust:
dolmens with markings from an unknown past,
horses chiseled in chalk on bluestone,
a huntsman’s frieze in Paleolithic time.
Slate tiles light his vigil over stags in flight,
bison stampeding, wild aurochs with lyre-shaped
horns, horses galloping his walls, and upon them
serpents, spirals, lozenges, and stars.
In the dawn of humanity, children built passage tombs
for the dead: stone hives in earth for the hum of spirit.
At solstice still, the sun enters their chambers precisely
for seventeen minutes. Certain years also the moon.
Wintering swans fly over as the stars hiss out.
In hollow pits the dead repose, bones whitening
in utter dark, where not even bats sing, and until
seen from the air by pilots during the Great War,
the domes slept, round and risen in the fields.
They also saw their own jeweled cities, their chess villages,
quilts of crops, and snake of rivers, snow wounded
by wire not seen before, and after the war,
the pilots led engineers to the fields of the domes.
At first no one knew what they were. Nothing was known.
Not that the builders would have been children to them,
nor why they toiled their lives moving stones
for the sun to slip through at a winter dawn,
lighting the spirals, stars, and lozenges
that the artist now transcribes along with wild aurochs,
bison, and the ancient horse. It is not known why
he paints them, standing as he does in a slate blindness—
only that with time, he might decipher a message regarding
aurochs, bison and spirals, lozenges and stars.
A ROOM
There is, on the wall, a scroll of rice paper and silk,
where sixty years ago a monk, after grinding bamboo
ash and the glue of fish bones into a stick, rubbed
the stick into stone and water, brushing a moment
of light from mind to paper. The brush was the cloud
that rains water and ink and nothing it touches can be erased.
On the floor, there is a rug woven from memory
of wool shorn toward the end of spring after the animals
are washed in the river. Its red is from insects that lived
in the bark of oaks, its green the green of fungus
on mulberry trees, its language unknown:
crosses, arrows, the repetition of houses and shoes.
The table near the window was a girl’s dowry chest,
with a wooden statue of Saint Dominic missing an arm,
and a Chinese couple in jade on pedestals of scholar-stone,
he stroking his long beard, hiding a sword behind his back,
she with an unopened lotus bloom over her shoulder,
two small Buddhas carried by hand from Hangzhou.
The blue crystal eggs were blown, then etched by a diamond cutter
who sold them in a city known for its nine-hundred-day siege.
A young man brought the coffee service from a souk:
six glass cups and a silver pot that chimes against a tray beside
books with the chapters Sauntering, Reading, Fencing,
and Idea of Necessary Connexion, warning us against
attributing to objects the internal sensations
they occasion, such as joy at finding the scroll after taking
shelter in a shop on an afternoon lit with fire pots, or relief
that the rug, soaked in the floodwaters that later destroyed
the house, was, in the end, saved by the snow it collected
on a winter night, its memory and the red
of its insects intact, along with, by coincidence, the dowry chest,
the saint, the Chinese couple, Buddhas, and blue eggs,
coffee service, and books chosen at random, as our moments are,
ours and the souls of others, who glimmer beside us
for an instant, here by chance and radiant with significance.
THE GHOST OF HEAVEN
1.
Sleep to sleep through thirty years of night,
a child herself with child,
for whom we searched
through here, or there, amidst
bones still sleeved and trousered,
a spine picked clean, a paint can,
a skull with hair.
2.
Night to night:
child walking toward me through burning maize
over the clean bones of those whose flesh
was lifted by zopilotes into heaven.
So that is how we ascend!
In the clawed feet of fallen angels
to be assembled again
in the workrooms of clouds.