Three Poems: Henry Walters morning dream
You tiptoed behind the scrim and I said, “Ha!” and put my hand through it, but it wasn’t you, it was Abe Lincoln from the penny the train had flattened the face right off. The profile turned to me and it was you, come back from a long trip north to the U.P. mining copper in overalls you said were hand-me-downs from your last life as a real estate tycoon, which, who knows why, or if it was even you, but the overalls, the overalls were true.
In Nevada
A hundred miles past any town at all
The radio keeps looping the loop of the dial
In search of a station. No matter your state of mind, The glare, the heat, the pulse of the center line,
The regular whump of cracks in a straightahead road
Conduct you, wide awake, into a trance
That pilots, flying by night, are warned to fear.
The distant horizon quavers and disappears;
Sky-blue, sage-green, in the intensity of light
Bleach out to chalk; the driver, mesmerized
And motionless in motion at the wheel,
Shrinks to a pair of disembodied hands
Thrust out like ants’ antennae in tunnel-dark.
Immensity, drought, distance without depth
Curl the edge of each coordinate plane;
Curvature not of hill or horizon merely, A pucker of the whole surround, as if
Pressed back against a centrifuge’s walls.
The highway narrows, endless, bendless, Hard and smooth and fast as the track of a luge
Foreshortening time and straitening circumstance.
It is a vein in which, just half alive,
You ride, minscule clot in the desert’s arm.
So was I once, and so in memory
Again the vertigo of near and far
Takes hold, as though the ground of all being were
This same Nevada still continuing.
I pull to the shoulder, shut off the car, step out. A shadow no bigger than a Rorschach blot
Cowers between my feet as if overexposed. Light drives its awl through every aperture, Blurs, negates, absorbs me into its field.
Noon is a circuit of galvanic force
Like the first that made the frog twitch back to life; It has me by hot tongs; turns on the current.
I stood and took it, I don’t know how long. Then angles, by imperceptible degrees, Softened. Above where the road winked out of sight, Something upright, flickering in and out
Of view on the white-hot shimmering sheet, Tiny, and whiter than white, a pin in a map,
Or the one the dressmaker puts between her lips
When she stands to take a measure. A steadiness.
A signpost of some sort. A man? A mast?
Knowing what I knew then, it might have been A mark of the outermost bound at which Another expedition, from another place, Stopped at last, scanned, saw nothing, and raised
A pole that flew no flag, not even surrender.
I soldered my eyes to the spot, drove on again
Until the sun dropped low and lit the spokes
Of one and then, inexplicably multiplied By change of focus, a hundred wind turbines, Revolving at the measured speed of thought
In a breeze there hadn’t been when the first appeared. Then suddenly I was there, an ant at their feet,
A Sancho among his master’s enemies, Agog at their size, their presence of mind, The whoosh of harmless blades as they passed overhead
Like scimitars sharpened into second-hands.
The road began to rise, and the sun sank Into the mirror. I angled the glare away. If I could drive to the other side of night, Daybreak would find me at the Great Divide. I was myself again, but the world was new: If I timed it right, I’d catch it in the act.
Light-years away, fragments of what had been The giant Betelgeuse hurtled—not yet here— Full-tilt at us. Even now I close my eyes And see the torrent of it in stampede, A fact, black horses riderless down black road, Soundlessly thundering down black road, A fact like fate, unswerving and head-on.
Psychopomp
Glyptemys insculpta
Rouse him. It takes a certain tact. Art of some kind. Seasoning. Like sounding for a silent thing. As to raise Lazarus, knock at the door of every tomb. (By raise I mean recall to mind.)
To restart the heart, raise it like bone artifact from river mud where oxygen’s thin as Everest’s: not to be sipped, to be ambered in.
There’s life above & before & below the room we know. (By room I mean this half-lit cave that molds & maps how river or time or poem behaves.)
Warden of season, raise your head. Heave onto this raft of shore. Shoulder through wet wallows of tightly scrolled ostrich ferns, trout lilies, lattice of beaver-coppiced pussywillow. You cover ground at a century’s pace. Gray as a glacial boulder above, red as Euphrates clay below, older than either— by older I mean over & after you raise the scutes of your vaulted ribs concentrically, course upon course
of ziggurat, like contour lines of a white pine’s age.
In you, time’s gauge, the built world roots & bivouacs as though the very dream of such armorial stratigraphy could carry us. Through human sod & kingdoms lost we rise blind as nightcrawlers drawn to the thumps of your practiced feet, a Doric order of columns raised to a Pleistocene god without a name.
Worm charmer, freshwater diviner, you sound like rain stampeding through our burial ground whose glyphs & ghosts are scoured down to afterthought. At the ancient site of your cold-blooded bed we bow our heads beneath the shell of the still intact original lintel, magnificent worn pediment toward which we raise ourselves as if in praise of all emergent life.