Facing in All Directions
Resting on her belly, her long-fingered hands suggest she is pregnant. It
might be
September, when the full-bore orchestration of insects rusts out, goes tinny.
By the way he has raised his hand to her face
as though it were an innovation on faces or merely the envelope
for his admiring, as though a hand could say thou — we recognize them,
lovers who have rushed
to the wood’s edge
on trails of inference
through all the thicknesses of scattered and divergent signs,
flying the contagion. What plague this time? What time?
As if there were a safe house, some renunciation to grope toward. Look:
He is still a boy even, an eagerness
he has let her pare
into the avowal that unlocked her eyes. And if
in his pocket he carries a flute carved
from the hollow ulna of a red-crowned crane,
and if in her kiss he can taste black pills she has swallowed to stop
the bleeding, it is not in the brief conspectus of
their history according to Dürer
who shows us, us alone, the skeleton behind them
unleaning from a tree
as a tense might be unbound. The couple pause
to appraise each other, their miraculous escape
from a fatality
that leads precisely here. As it always does.
But warning birds have yet to fly up in their faces. Briefly,
however briefly, they outstrip ordination.
———
Then the sun’s limb darkens, clouds roll in, and when rains let up
no one is there. Only two stalk-eyed flies fighting on a stump. In a
distant city
once named for the white thighs of its women, pigeons
blister Sacre Couer’s dome. Dim, early morning, on Blvd. St.-Germain,
phalanxes of sycamore thicken with seed balls. Raiding
the palace, a grimy throng rouses the queen from sleep.
As hallways swell with shouting, she gathers herself
into her gown
and stumbles to the ante-room
known as the Oeil-de-Boeuf. Although she rehearsed
these moments, each gesture is fraught, each effort invested
in others, an architecture of ornament she cannot begin to put together.
With a quivering in the walls as the great doors bow inward. Like candles
on a sumptuous table,
the evenly-spaced steps of her fleeing,
the little coils of scent swirling up from each footprint
conspire to weigh her down. And while she pounds at the king’s chamber,
a single bellow
fills the hall of mirrors, as though a huge mouth were coming
to swallow the remaining ripe hours
already dished for her to try.
Always: as though a huge mouth were coming.
But days warm and the tourists walk on
through the palace, through an incessant storm of cometary grains,
swayed by plans for lunch,
by rear-guard obligations. One shopping cart
rammed into another. Little failures leading to blankness.
The Seine rises and oceans rise and form their lightless floors, giant worms,
mouthless
and gutless, wave.
———
Dear C, do you remember finding
this rock in the garden? Grey-blue silicious slate. It burrowed up
through the millions of years of sedimentary facies
between begotten
and born. Events
occur as discourse, it’s true, but who
would read the stone or say that such-and-such a point, at these coordinates of
August luster
and the ratcheting of cicadas, it entered the drama
interrupting life as it was lived and known.
It brought no plague; it has no mouth — a word
I write and see your mouth, the star
in your lower lip where once your tooth went through.
No warning birds. No slackening of the river.
———
An alluvial scar incised
by a river is like the gnash of arriving through thought at words. And words
themselves can be compared to stones,
relentless systems of reference. On the island of Cyprus, amid rubble
from the earthquake that obliterated Kourion
in 365 A.D., they found
the skeletons of a young man,
a woman, and their eighteen month old child.
The man’s arm circled the woman’s waist, his left leg
as though to shield her,
he had thrown across her pelvis. He held her hand and clutched the child.
Bliss comes uncounting the hour, seizing no set moment. Some
claim there isn’t time to consider the whole of the story or
the interdependence of its characters. Some say every meaning will be
revealed until the last witness is lost and gone.