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If one could write a line to stir us to compassion,
If one could. . .
I
The brush stroked tree's
pond-image:
The long swept, delicious weep of its
stillness.
. . . write a line to stir us. . .
White catted mist arches its back,
stretching
morning awake on the mountains.
The night creeps back to its meadows then.
The birds unzip their calls in the trees,
Chuweet, Chuweet, Chuchuweet.
Leanward,
leeward,
the
creakening comes.
*
Tamp, tamp, tamp of rain
dripping from one leaf
onto
another:
Now the plopping rain pools
in the pots of broad, brave leaves,
their curved, inward borders.
The mitten leaves,
the still leaves,
the leavening when.
*
. . . to compassion . . .
Whither go the bees in their long
last?
Summers, the sunlight lingers here, lying
under
the widening hammock of stars,
her heart limbecking away, her wormy
dreams
bubbling
afroth in the filling-up flask
of
dusk. But I remember, sometimes,
in the citied, humid evenings,
in
spring's early beguilings,
among
wisps of clouds smudged-potted orange
by smog and dust, the sun hurted and wisdomed
raggedly,
like one of the homeless
foraging in a dumpster: One of those
who
have come south to warm out the winter,
just one of "them," those
someones whose bones retain
the
cold, even on a warm night,
one
of those nights, like this one,
in
this harbored city, in April.
*
Oh it may seem simple, but it's really a trick
To uncobweb the heart of a brittle, old stick.
If one could. . . , If I
could, learn to feel by rhymes
Again, to fill the spaces between my
charitable times. . .
In the cold I passed him, curled up in the park
By the wilted flowers that had scraped my bones dark.
And did I shiver then? Did a north wind
blow
From synaptic pits where nightmares go?
Did I peel back my eyes with a paring knife,
As I beasted in the why, in the hard of my life?
Oh it may seem simple, but it's really a
trick
To uncobweb the heart of such a brittle,
old stick,
in
this harbor,
this twinkling harbor of exhausted
homeless.
II
And I am not exempted.
Old
oily, burning heart.
Old blister tongued-furnace throat-windy morning. Old breeze.
Old
cusp of a man, in Autumn,
in
the twiggy time
when the tongues of the trees are lopped
off and shed.
Old bashful and leafy shadow place. Old
nappy dreamer. Old walk by the pan
handler,
looking straight ahead past the outstretched hand.
Old.
Old.
Old.
Old hunger. Old
rub your back
and
place your heart in the thin time.
Old place your soft bones on the sagging
bed.
Old give me mine.
Old mortgage. Old lawn mower mulching leaf stuffer weed killer.
Old
two cars.
Old
bill payer. Old dribbling pennies
to
the causes in which you profess to believe.
Old
cold
bastard.
And
older.
Older.
Growing
older.
I
am not exempt.
*
.
. .write a line that stirs us . .
Then came the dream of the windowless
prison, the dream of being lined up against a wall by some colonel on the grunty take
pressing a cocked gun to my temple. And when I had no information to share, or he grew
sick of greasily raping me, or just bored, he pulled the trigger. This took place
in Iraq or Bosnia, or twenty years ago in El Salvador or South Africa, or thirty in
Vietnam or Chile, or. . . take your pick which decade and which tragedy. By the time
the bullet came, my mind was a black template. Though there were still instincts of forest
smells and images left unransacked, unravaged in a shadowy corner, there were no thoughts
about "the people" or "the greatness of poetry" anymore. The great,
hinged gate where the words flow out was creaked shut with the first blow to the head by a
rifle butt.
*
. . . to compassion. . .
Everywhere the night curves,
caught in a sack of searching,
wilting
in the Sabbath of lilies and stark branches,
nibbling the stars white.
Everywhere
the night blossoms
in its foreign fastness.
Its dark crust drips,
like the wax of a candle that calls
a
shine from the inner body
down
its sable edges,
like this early soft moon, weaned to a
want,
that shows itself on the eastern rim
above the mountains tonight.
I listen to what the cardinal says. I say to him:
"Oh dribbler of noise,
come
out from the shadows of weeds;
help
me to come out into the world,
to
come upon myself,
to
find my easeful place in it,
to
walk on the avenues of here,
to
harrow out into the now."
III
. . . to compassion. . .
The wavery candle light of water, the ribbony,
flaming water that pleats and curtains
down
the long thighs of the mountain
and the afternoon's lengthening prism,
this
water fall --
silvery clear, that washes
down the mountain, galumphing past
punk-wigged clumps of lichen -- falls
at
the place where the far water
splashes splintery into a still pool,
turbulently stops
for a moment, then continues and
pushes
over
into
a smaller fall,
and
from there to a more tranquil pool.
A stiller pool.
And
then a third. A littler fall. Stiller still.
Quietest of all.
And that is how the thinning stops, says
the cardinal,
how
your thinning will stop.
*
And what would you say to your love if she
arched her back; and you kissed her on the belly; and you made love to her with your
fingers and tongue; and she came quietly, a wading bird weeping, as the clouds and webs
glistened; and the salt-aired storm rummaged quietly, grazing in the far off mountains,
staining the tin flames of lightning, waiting for the tiny, groping sun to come out again;
Cardinal, what would you say?
A precious burden
unhardens.
Frost of the moon,
a white cornflower.
Then the air swirled outside,
and the leaves shivered, and some came down,
and
the years passed, and the world changed,
like
a vase of flowers, rearranged.
IV
. . . to compassion. . .
Angels ache in the gullies of
mountains,
their wolfish needs
lie
in the patches of tilting weeds,
in the lost look of the cow,
that
bellow, that bell
as the night blossoms,
softening the edges of stars
into
a foreign fastness.
*
I mean to make amends with my spirit while I'm here.
At least, I've meant to make amends.
Everywhere it seems the night
blossoms in its foreign fastness,
and I feel coveted by both houses:
the sun's,
twilit
like a fair at sunset,
orange
ball glinting off the carnival rides
lit
up like leaking rainbows;
and the moon's,
rusting
over the western meadow,
like
a country of old souls cringing home.
Coveted by both houses, I choose neither.
Nor do I choose among the wolves,
their
dark, lost hungry please-have-me eyes,
their
long edging and furry paws fiery,
like the beige lightning
in
the swath of the blackening horizon.
I choose instead
not
to hide under the teal shell of the forest,
nestled
among the sugary flowers,
not to wait, but, having swept each other up in our arms,
to
run with my love
over
the hardening horizons of this earth.
Stuart Lishan's work has appeared in Kenyon
Review, Arts & Letters, Mudlark, XConnect, Barrow Street, American Literary Review,
and others.
Click here to read more poetry by
Stuart Lishan in ForPoetry.com
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