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About the Artist
Rebecca Seiferle is the author of two previous books of poetry, The Music We Dance To and The Ripped-Out Seam and a translation of César Vallejo’s Trilce, all from Sheep Meadow Press. Her work appears in a number of anthologies, including The Best American Poetry 2000. Her work has won the Bogin Memorial Award (1991) and The Cecil Hemley Memorial Award (1998) from the Poetry Society of America. The Ripped-Out Seam was a finalist for the Paterson Poetry Prize, and her translation of Trilce, was the only finalist for the 1992 PEN West Translation Award. She is the founding editor of The Drunken Boat, an online magazine of international poetry and translation.
Last October, Rebecca was invited to participate in the Key West Literary Seminar, where she taught a workshop and moderated a panel with Linda Hogan, Annie Proulx, Peter Mathiessen, and others. She also gave a reading with Michael Ondaatje. Two poems from Bitters have been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, one by The Nebraska Review and another by Copper Canyon. Also winner of the Western States Book Award, in 2002. She lives with her family in Farmington, New Mexico.
Writings
As he aged into impassive calm,
strangers thought my father was a Navajo,
but, as a child, I knew he was a buffalo.
That beast with its puzzled stare, bred back
from the edge of extinction, ruminating
among the repetitive flowers, his shoulders
beginning to slump from emphysema,
like, and unlike, a calf’s emerging hump.
“The Great Circle,” my picture book
called it: on one side of the page, an Indian,
black braids flying behind him,
bow and arrow in hand, urged his pinto on;
on the other, a single buffalo, the muscles
beneath his thick hide rippling
in a stampede of alarm. Cracking
the book’s spine as he flattened the pages,
my father drew a grid
over the Indian and the buffalo,
then enlarged each section onto whitewashed
masonite. Painting for the first time,
he was an ancient cartographer
who, mapping a round earth on a flat surface,
blurs the outlines of separate things:
the man’s face smudged into sky,
the curly hump extending too far
down the buffalo’s right foreleg,
dissolving into grass.
What he caught exactly
was the wound. The blood seeping
around the arrow in the bison’s flank, as vivid
and as distant as the scar
on my father’s back: long before my birth,
someone tried to rob him; he walked home
with a knife in his torso but only knew it
when he glimpsed the shaft, embedded,
in the mirror. What did I know
of my father? His pain lived
at such a distance, it was an imaginary line
that, circling the globe, dissected the earth
into halves. While he brooded at the window,
his black mood, an injured bull
haunting the edge of his herd, I circled
the house with war cries. Pretending
to be an Indian, I thought we were opposed.
But now, only this painting remains of my father,
I see in the great circle of the Indian and the buffalo,
the way in which my father and I
were divided, and are one.
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There is the angel with the pulled-back wing
and the blond, acerbic, angel
who believes it has never been maimed.
There is the angel disguised in a flag,
red stars confining its abundant torso,
and the deracinated angel
who cannot stop
swaying back and forth.
There is the white angel of the shattered
eardrum whose speech is broken
by what he has not heard,
and the angel with aphasia
who cannot pronounce the vowels
of her longing.
There is the angel who hums in the beeweed
in the imperfect tenses of the wasp.
There is the angel who walks at the edge
of the highway and inhales deeply the exhaust of every
passing, and the colorless angel who longs to be
free of any blessing. There is the red-haired angel
that curls listening
to the blue vein along your thumb,
and the angel that is rumored
to dance at the feet of wisdom,
and the angel of indefinite distance. And the angel
whose open hand is a living question
and the angel who stumbles along on the one good leg
the frost allowed him to keep. And the angel
who lies down like a dog and lets the wolves
eat the throat out of its body,
and the angel who is so bound by one look
of human recognition
that it returns to us, again and again.
And the angel with the body of an animal
who hides, beneath a wing,
its one human hand
that is inexorably drawing forth
the root of every living thing.
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“Winnowed along the earth or whirled along the sky,
Life lives on. It is the lives, the lives, the lives that die.”
–Lucretius
For instance, the last time I saw my friend
alive—though I didn’t know it was the last
time, or I would have said something, put a wedge
in the revolving door, to stop its panes
from breaking up her sandy hair, turning
her reflection out into the New York City street.
But perhaps not, for I have always liked the apocryphal
St. Francis who asked how he would spend his last day,
answered “keep on hoeing the garden.”
So, perhaps, knowingly, I would still have given
Beth the flowers that others had given me–
an over-generous bouquet, mingling the blooms
of summer, and of spring, their conflicting
fragrances, odd lengths of stem, falling over
into the porcelain box full of water.
I didn’t know what to do with them; I was leaving
for Seattle and couldn’t imagine carrying
that severed field, sloshing, to the other side
of the continent. Beth’s arms were empty,
she had helped pick the flowers, was,
in a sense, transporting them back
to their origins, back to the impulse
that had first sent them to me,
and she gathered them up gladly,
maneuvering their fragile coronas
through the narrowness of the glass door.
I don’t mean to suggest her going
was anything like Persephone being swept out
of view, the flowers falling back
to earth, dissevered, dying.
It was a real cab she got into,
not the one we invented the night before
to escape a boring crowd. When we talked
about this habit people have of disappearing,
we meant how our chums from college had wanted to go home
too early, though it wasn’t to “home,” but some hotel
or friend’s apartment; we had all been able to meet, precisely,
because we were away from “home,” had vacated its premises,
assumed a somewhere else, “behind” or “ahead” of us–
where we would be awaited with longing,
like those small grains Demeter hoarded
to outlast the winter. In my hotel room, we kept on talking
while I packed. Then, a moment of quiet–like the wound
that uprooting leaves in the earth–began eroding
into canyons, abysmal rifts. Much later,
I was to connect the ease with which she had slipped away
to the cancer, its blood red seed beginning to sprout,
as it must have been possible, so long ago,
to hear the grasses being crushed,
beneath the rim of that black chariot wheel,
as the Lord of the Underworld coasted into view.
I kept packing, cramming everything
into my suitcase–reminded of how Unamuno said
we were all travelers who stuffed whatever
we could into our luggage, then trimmed away what
did not fit–though it was the night itself
that the clock’s fluorescent hands were pruning
down to nothing. In the morning, when she ran
toward a cab, pulled away forever from the curb,
I remembered how, in college, we always danced together
to “I Heard It Through The Grapevine,”–the same way
I would hear of her death, called
from a warm bath to the phone,
thinking it was a joke, as the chilling water
dripped and pooled on the floor around me.
The last time I danced with her,
we were holding hands, twenty of so of us,
in a line of bodies, whirling through a darkened student union,
the Charlie Chaplin movie flickering
on the opposite wall, mingling our hands, our faces,
with bits of the tramp’s twirling cane, his sad expression.
I followed Beth’s white blouse, an ordinary white blouse,
as we rushed ahead, but she didn’t pull me along;
it was the momentum of the circle itself, the force
of those leaping bodies, a merry-go-round of flesh, linked
hand to hand to the one before and the one after–a wheel
like that other wheel, black spokes, rim of iron, moving
faster and faster until the velocity, the whip effect
at the end of the line, began to snap us off,
one by one, flying into the darkness.
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Since metaphor derives from transferring
a burden from one to the other, it
was clear, then, from the beginning,
that blood-drenched hall, that it would be easier
to silence pleas for mercy
if heard as the unintelligible
chirping of birds–easier
to string servant girls up like pigeons.
So, Odysseus’ heart was a dog, its hackles
rising when he saw the women caught up
in the suitors’ arms, someone else’s pets,
and only in a dream did Penelope weep
for her slaughtered geese, their soft white strewn
round the water trough. When Telemachus strung
a wire between two trees and began hanging
the servant women, one by one, noosing
them in a line, the dying women
were described as thrushes spreading their wings,
doves or larks caught in a spring.
They were killed as a flock of birds, as undeserving
of the death of a single human being.
Though, first, in a colder, waking moment, the undisguised
Odysseus ordered the women to remove the corpses
from the great hall, to stack their lovers
in the yard. One cradling each beloved head,
another clutching at the feet,
the women became mere things–
their flesh a rag for scouring the furniture,
trying to scrub clear the appalling
table. Their last task
before being strangled–to dispose
of the earth itself, the blood-soaked floor
that Telemachus meticulously cut out,
so in the future–that narrow corridor
down which so many would be driven–a visitor
would not know she was invited into
a charnel house.
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When I was five or six, my parents took me to a ceremony
of Sioux and Cheyenne dancers. The moving,
eagle feathers plucked from living birds,
chest plates quivering with porcupine quills,
the beadwork shimmering
on their waists, wrists, ankles,
all of it began
in the dance itself. A step
that lifted its knee to the waist, whirled around
and screed sideways, arms trembling
with the attached plumage,
the foot drumming sound
from the earth. I wanted to be like them,
to be one of them, so wore everywhere
the red and white solar design of Red Cloud
stitched into a disc of deerskin.
As I ran, screaming war cries
around my parents’ house, my hands already
scarred from trying to fashion arrows
from the dwarfed bushes in the suburban yard,
the necklace around my neck
gave me the power of another world,
its red eye, the ruby eye of the grebe
that dives into the water and comes up
on the other side of the lake.
On the other side of the street, in another
lot, three girls in white frilly dresses,
their hair coiled in ringlets and bows, curtsied
around a portable table where real eighths
of a sandwich dressed
each miniature plate, real tea was poured
into tiny play cups, and they, too, were rehearsing
another ideal. I was seven, then,
and, oh my longing to be like her, to be her,
and her longing to be like me–the one
who looked up and stared back
out of the perfectly cultivated
garden of her face.
In school, we took out our scorn and our longing
upon each other,
while the teacher described
our fathers, settlers so driven to own
a deeded plot, a fenced garden,
that they became their own oxen
and pulled their wagons, full of belongings,
across the mountains that divided America.
Then, my family moved and moved and kept moving
and all that lasted was the never-completed history
class that I had to begin over and over again.
By the end of the year,
the threads that held
the beads in place
had worn through, leaving
only the disc of deerhide,
its circle of skin,
rubbed free of any design.
Now, in my own small plot on this continent,
I see in one corner of the snow-covered field,
that photograph: 1892, Wounded Knee,
a red man, spread-eagled, frozen to a wire fence,
his hand snagged on the barbs, stopped
in mid-air, trying to grasp
how white the beeweed is,
its riot of purple replaced
with the intricate architecture of ice;
if it were struck, the plant itself
would shatter. Cold
from all the ways
in which we will never be whole,
after all these years,
running errands among the scattering
of autumn, or driving past the horror
of two horses struck by a speeding car, the white one
with its belly torn, the red one, its skull caved-in,
their legs outstretched, frozen in mid-stride,
as if they were running together,
without explanation or hope, I feel
this other movement
beyond pity, beyond blessing, rising out
of the closed wounds of the earth and the still open
wounds of the rivers.
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on our seventeenth anniversary,
Years ago, when I made you that poster,
that collage of photographs snipped
from magazines, the flora and fauna
of the world, it was the symmetrical
resonance between the sleeping ibis, its beak
folded into its thick neck feathers,
and the heron raising its head to the sky
as if it could drink that blue, or the way
the curve of the seashell replicated
the whorl of a cloud, that appealed,
every gesture answering or opposed.
Two moose were swimming across
the glacial blue of a Montana lake,
their antlered heads crowning the waters,
while, further down, in their Africa,
the spotted necks of two young deer
in an X, as they extended soft snouts
to one another. The twos, all the duos,
matched or asymmetrical pairs. But now I see
preserved beneath the lacquer–the reflective
sheen taking on an opaque body of its own,
its skin translucent as honey or amber–our
entire lives transpiring into another, as the curve
of an eagle’s wing, soaring in a corner, becomes
earthbound, burdened, in the straining
arch of a donkey’s neck, then rises, again,
into the nearly transparent wing of a bee,
working rapidly from flower to flower. All we
know of beauty is the necessity that breaks
and uplifts the continents into these
alpine views, the drag of the moon that sculpts
the coastline while ravaging the small, fertile
tidal pools, the wind that erodes a mountain
with a river of green rain, all this
grace of mountain or desert or swamp
originating in the draft and drift
that drew us to one another, impelled
by the same force. Like the cross
in the center of the poster, whose limbs
are the microscopic color photographs
of molecular structures, cells or chemical compounds,
we are, and are not, our aggregations.
How could I know then, how could you,
that the soft muzzling motion of the animals
was another dance that would wheel us
constantly out of ourselves, and into another?
We began as the only two human figures
in this scene, the only two in black and white
among the spotted and speckled. There
at the base of the poster, as if the cross
and its towering tree of life were rooted
in their spines, two Peruvian children,
a boy and a girl, lean insolently
on either side of a round table that
their arms reach across, their hands
entwining almost casually at its edge.
As if they with the soft, bruised
hats of their people and their patched
Sunday best knew all along, knew
from the beginning, of that house
at the center of the world,
where the faces of children drift
like seeds, and everyone must go down, dancing.
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When to the rhythm
of my husband’s snore, my son cocks
his two-year-old leg over
his father’s hip, snuggles
deep into that parental rib,
I lean over and without touching–
my nostrils poised at the brink
of his curls–breathe in
the baby scent of him. Beneath the common
smell of soap, Mickey Mouse pajamas,
there is another scent–
indescribable, him
a boyish musk, that I bend to
as he all summer knelt to the unfolding of
the roses, nosing the petals with his eyes, opening
his mouth to their colors.
Each of my children inhaled the world like this,
Maria cuddling my pillow said it smelled
of frankincense,
Ann put on her father’s shirt
as if it were his dark, rich skin,
while I, sniffing, could smell nothing,
from years of letting the world go up
in smoke. How transitory
it is, how brief. So I lie here,
just breathing, trying to stay
awake forever in the garden
of this bed.
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Excerpts from Bitters
The only ghost I’ve ever seen
was that of a baby black bear, waiting
for me one night in the kitchen in Salmon, Idaho,
a small green tornado caught in the corner by the stove,
full of pale yellow lights like the tiny polished stones
that flash in the bed of the coldest mountain streams.
All winter, we lived in that rented house, while the landlord,
in the garage, practiced his butcher’s art, skinning, gutting, dissembling
whatever the local hunters brought him–and I’d seen the cub
hanging outside my window. Flayed of its rich black skin,
reduced to the scaffold of its bones, its overlay of red muscle and white fat,
without claws or snout, pud or tail of bear, it hung in the glare
of the porch light like a human child. So when I went roaming
the silenced house so late at night and was met by that wild presence,
I spoke to it until it sighed and vanished into the peeling wall,
and left me, the only child still there, snared in the net of the world.
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That day on the mountain, the stones began to speak,
as Christ promised–when he rode into Jerusalem,
and the scribes rebuked the crowd for such
a riot of outcry and song– and if I hushed
them, even the stones would rise up
and sing. The guides told us impending lightning
made the stones chat and clatter, clacking
in that meadow, at 14,000 feet, the rocks
shifting restlessly, shivering against one
another, tapping one another into sound,
in the gathering embrace of an electrical
storm. If our hair should rise into a sudden halo,
we should fall to our knees upon the ground.
But lightning isn’t born of the nimbus. The stones sing
because electricity is rising from the earth–fingers
of invisible light, unseen streamers, rising like longing
out of everything that is. So Job called down
the whirlwind, and in Michelangelo’s painting,
it’s Adam, lactescent and supine,
who lifts his hand and summons God to earth.
So in the beginning, a pulse must have reached out
of the primordial ooze, out of the stumps
and stubs of chemical compounds, calling
down the spark from heaven–the bolt
that would transform their static ladders
into fluid DNA. The flare of desire, the jolt
of becoming always rises out of the earth.
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“Bitters” are not bitter, are not
injurious, ancient instruments
of torture, cruel flavorings
of death, are not “the proper pain
of taste” (according to Bain, the baneful)
but a small bottle of bitters, a drop
or two, makes the orange juice brilliant
in a glass of gin and quiets
the stomach when it is unsettled
by true bitterness–whatever
in the world is ‘hard to swallow’
or admit, the crumb of cruelty
caught in one’s craw, the iron bit
gnashing in one’s teeth, the baleful
bile of ‘what has to be’
tasted to extremity.
Which is probably why
the British, intoxicated
in South America, copyrighted the recipe
into the colonial world
to try and make purgative,
a medicinal substance,
out of their own doubtful history,
caught between sour peevishness
and virulence of action
and of feeling–chugging the wild plenty
of the bitters down. But, no, bitters
is something more than “a noggin
of lightning, a quartern of gin.” A secret
recipe distilled from the bark of the tree
of life, the original verb of an aboriginal sensibility, the surviving
noun of the cloud canopy in Venezuela, the genealogy
of a mindful tribe, the undiscovered draught
of mercy–not extract of gentian
or quinine or wormwood, those old World
poetic distillations–but something vegetable,
persistent, extending roots into the world.
An autochthonic brew. Who tastes it,
tastes sweet earth.
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At dawn, as Jesus was returning to the city, he felt hungry. Seeing a fig tree by the roadside he went over to it, but found nothing there except leaves. He said to it, “Never again shall you produce fruit!”; and it withered up instantly.
–Matthew 21, 18-19
It’s the cursed fig tree, backlit, a bitter
halo in the distant lights, though I don’t know
how it came here, transplanted, still out
of season, surviving amputee of God’s will.
The man who climbed into a fig tree to glimpse
Christ in the crowd was blessed, but the barren tree
was blasted, lopped-off by a word from Christ,
to forever signify all fruitless souls.
A trope of useless love, it grips now a clay hill
in this Southwestern desert, and what I see
is how it thrives, as love does, stubborn beyond
the pointing finger, beyond the uttered curse.
For while its limbs are but stubs, it’s dense
with life, so many new sprouts sporting out
of its trunk and roots, it rises within the thicket
of its own persistent self.
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In the groin of my infant son, twin hernias,
each the heft of a small stone, caught
in the fists of his abdomen, made him howl
in Toledo. We raced from the villa, down
the mountain toward the picturesque view,
through the gates named for the blood red
color of their stones, down the darkened
streets, repeating to the policemen, mi hijo,
mi hijo, está muy enfermo, muy enfermo,
and in the lobby, as we waited, they carried
out a little girl, naked, shrieking, some plastic
apparatus, like a strange clear diaper,
attached to her, and they carried her by
her arms, her limbs flailing, and dropped her
into her mother’s lap, and when the doctors
finally spoke to us, I heard their Castilian
as if it were English, and as they removed
his diaper, I saw the knots of the hernias
had unraveled, the intestine withdrawn
out of view, and everything was as it should be,
back inside his body, and we drove back to the villa,
ceremonious and leisurely with good luck and Thank Gods,
and one of the two cranky, ancient brothers who ran the inn
was waiting for us outside the gate, beside the ancient
olive press, and as we told him what had happened,
we looked down toward the plain of Toledo, and
fireworks were exploding in the sky, a feast day
in a small village outside the gates, as if the universe
were welcoming us back, all that color breaking,
glory and mercy and mercy and unspeakable relief.
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Each morning, his baby fingers clack
on the electronic keys of the obsolete typewriter
that my father left us when he died,
and what my son hears and loves is the sound
of his own fingers clattering into the world, the zing
of the carriage return, the space bar like a runaway train
clicking through the letters that he is only beginning
to recognize, the hunt and peck
of his own name.
We all stumble into ourselves
like this, fitting our fingers to the shape of letters,
while the page gallops out of our reach,
and, though he’s only five, it’s loss that drives him
to the words, trying to pick out his own name
among whatever is attached to himself, whatever
he longs to answer, relating, each day
a letter to his sister, now gone from home,
far away in college.
The page, when it rolls off the cylinder
is full of the rhythm of his furious
digits, all drive and urgency of expression,
a jumble of letters and numbers, not words,
not legible text, but a sea of drift,
and, yet, at times, in the broken lines,
a name, a word, floats up into view–
the first legibility of the heart, its exacting
infancy– lluv luve yur broder Jacob.
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My daughter was born with a blue moon
at the base of her spine. “A Mongolian spot:”
Hopi children on Third Mesa are born with it,
as are the great-great-great-grandchildren of the Huns
who fled defeat in Rome to settle quietly
in the cantons of Switzerland… Unclaimed
fathers and mothers claim us in the flesh
of our children; the birthmark grips us by the heels.
When my son was running a fever, I discovered
the distorted shapes of Africa, South America,
floating on his tongue, I worried it was something
terrible, strep throat gone horribly wrong.
The doctor laughed and said it was nothing,
just a case of “geographical tongue.” All his life,
he would bear this map of lost Pangaea–its continents
now altering and flaring to a baby’s health and mood.
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In the morning, their heads vised
between the pillows, my daughters try to hush the world:
the bright peep at the window, the grinding
of the espresso machine, the cacophony of piping.
At night, so late the moon is falling
back into the sea, they’re improvising
a rap song, with click and cluck
of mouth and tongue, to keep the world awake.
I tell myself they’re just teenagers–and, thank God,
not like those streaming in an erotic medley of stoned
cars through the Safeway parking lot every night–that this
is why they mimic bears, caught in unpredictable seasons.
But the fact is I’m the one who’s growling, ranging
through their rooms, as if rummaging for what I’ve lost,
and they’re just children craving what I cannot give–
eye of lover, hand of friend – and the love
that I still can. So they go on trying to block out
my morning racket,
and I trying to tone down their twosome at 2 a.m.
Still, for all the awkwardness of this mooring, the stem
of something labors, creaks, joyfully breaks free,
as they move into a time beyond me,
and, at moments, we find ourselves in some noon
or midnight, laughing, cutting up, unable to stop urging one another
into inconvenient song.
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I was the caped bat, wings flaring from my shoulders,
whom the others followed down the hill, a girl
leading all the boys in thundering
descent, so he had to make a point
of beating me, on that cold day,
when the drifts and whistles of the snow
creeping in the doors kept us inside
playing marbles, where I won for keeps
his tawny-eyed shooter, his favorite steelie,
and all his blue-eyed cats. All of a sudden,
he grabbed me, using his only lethal move,
and I was on my hand and knees, like a dog
on its belly, grabbed by the scruff of the neck.
Yet he was not strong enough to hurt me,
so we froze in a tableau of display
and shame before the other second-graders.
I knew that I could grab him by the head and flip
him over my shoulder onto the cold tiles
and knew, too, it would seriously hurt him.
I was strong enough to do it, at seven
had already pummeled the bullies who locked
my three-year-old sister out of the house,
had stood in the chicken yard at the age of five,
and, waiting for the bus, bloodied the face
of the eight-year-old who meant to teach me
a lesson. But I paused that morning, for whatever
reason, thinking my way through the fog of embarrassment
into the deeper fog of anger, where something cleared
into a brightness, a clearing within me, a kind of meadow–
ground to stand on, air to breathe, and mercy in the world.
I let him go, he let me go, we let we each other live.
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“It’s not true that, in despair, I threw myself
into the sea or became that bronze curiosity
of the Middle Ages–male, guarding
a secret larder. To escape those
who kept hunting me, I transformed myself
into a small brown sparrow, nondescript.
That crowd with spears and nets
pursuing me through the white-washed villages
never guessed that what they so feared–a sacred monster,
a woman, with the claws of a lion, wings of a bird–
could take on the shape of the ordinary,
could hide in the hollow of a river
where the grass throngs with goslings every spring.
There are so many sparrows in the world
they would never notice one more,
trembling at the edge of a swamp, hidden in the depths
of the branches. So for thousands of years,
I have been sitting here, clutching this perch, thinking
and thinking my way back, dreaming my way
into the dreams of your daughters who already feel
rude wings beginning to prickle, erupting
from their shoulders, at the moment they awake.”
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I was wrong when I compared the mask of my own face
to an artifact, some kind of relic, or the shed skin of a snake.
That day, there was no wounding. At the museum,
that morning, when the woman was teaching
the children how to make masks of their own faces
with the plaster of Paris bandages that doctors use
for instant casts, I was glad to do it, to lather
my daughters’ face with lotion, to place the wet strips
on their faces, and, later, to have them do the same to me.
The fine grit of dissolved earth floating on my skin, the
patting of their hands like the beating of eyelashes against
my face, was pleasant, cool, and, afterwards, choosing
the colors to paint the mask was like selecting one’s own
plumage: Ann choosing a singular purple, Maria
a black and white splashed with orange, myself, blue turquoise.
When I was holding the shape of my own face in my hand,
it was nothing like a death mask. I saw how easy it was
to put the self aside and pick it up again. It wasn’t the sacrificial mask
I’d seen in Mexico, a human skull inlaid with lapis lazuli, a merciless reduction,
but a moment of happiness, a fragile shell, the gift
of mother and daughter, when, laughing,
we shaped each other into being
by touching what we were.
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Lord, my lightening, flashes over the rims of Utah
where we are hemmed by pitchforks of light
and driving through a rain that evaporates
before it can touch the earth. A spire pierces
the flank of a hill, and fire leaps forth from a real
burning bush, clearly visible, twenty miles away. They say
the place lightning touches is hotter than the sun. No lucid
veil, this storm, but a fist of the Father whiche sendeth lyghtelyng
to the destruction of myscheuous men –heaven’s
arrhythmia jarring one’s own electrical pulse. My father,
as a young man, was riven by lightning, arrested
as he stood by a chain-link fence. No spiritus paraclitus
that in the lyknesse of a lightnynge lit upon the world,
the strike imparted no grace or wisdom, was as meaningless
and incomprehensible as the jabs of his invalid father.
He woke up later, lightning pains around his heart,
rain misting on his face, and said nothing of God’s blow,
except by implication when he spoke of his training as a boxer
that no human being could knock him out.
Years later, lightning came into our house, forked
through an upstairs window, and shed light upon the vanity
where my sister’s reflection was putting on her makeup,
and, as children fishing in a mountain meadow,
we all fled a net of lightning. Like the tiny brook trout
we had been catching in the small cold
branches of the stream, we leapt and trembled
at hook and gaff. We ran and ran
from the Almighty shrouded in thunder
on that mountain vertical, always discharging
from above to below, every wing
nesting in heaven meant to raptor us
with a crushing blow. Now our mischievous laughter
silenced by this storm, my six-year-old son fears
the encircling hedge of God, the bright scowl of the nagging elders,
and keeps asking what happens if…if lightning strikes our car,
and he’s calmed only when his father says, “Don’t worry,
lightning rarely strikes a car the rubber wheels
are insulated from the earth and all that lightning
really wants is to get back to the earth.”
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We knew the buffalo were dangerous, but, most of the time
as we drifted among them, longing to touch
the bright curls of one of the spring calves,
their coats, the color of new pennies, they lowered
their heads to the wild grasses, and shied away
only when we drew too near. For months
we moved among them, circling
the sweet expression of the calves,
as they kept circling that hill that seemed a ziggurat,
pointed at the summit, like that odd vision
of Columbus, off the coast of South America
“the earth was round and something rising
in the distance like a breast,” who thought
he had reached the beginning
of all creation, the nipple
of time and space. The hill glittered
with mica-flakes, the size and breadth
of a human hand-scattered
over its flanks. We tried many times to bevel by hand
the stones into a clear plane, an eyeglass
through which we could view the world,
but the crystals only split along the cleavage,
until, running among that shaggy tribe,
we forgot our mothers, our fathers, as if running among
that remnant, we could save some part of ourselves
from extinction. Crazy with liberty,
I veered toward a calf, drew so close
that I could never remember
if I had touched it or not. But the mother,
her malevolence, one movement with her desire
to protect, wheeled in alarm,
and as she did so, the herd wheeled with her, as a flock of sparrows
will turn in the sky to enfold a red-tailed hawk. A current
of rippling fear or anger, the buffalo
turned to charge us. We ran, the breath scattering
out of our childish lungs, barely able to keep ahead
of that rhythm that had always seemed like that of a choppy
rocking horse but which now seemed as fluid
as a flash flood churning down an arroyo.
We ran toward the hill, hoping the slope would save us
by wearing them down, the climb exhaust their fury,
and it did, but, so slowly that by the time the buffalo stopped,
milling about halfway up, we were ourselves stampeding,
seized by a panic, so ancient, it kept our ribs
splintering in our chests all the way up the hill
until we crammed ourselves into the tiny cave
at its summit, clinging to ourselves
among the black widow spiders, the sloppy cobwebs
of fear, and it was only then that I understood–
the earth is not our mother but a wild music beyond the self.
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Writings
Excerpts from Bitters
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