Glimpses

I see you through an eye of grass . . . leaves shuffling to the nearest curb
one foot more distant than another . . . harvesting their way across
a parking lot filled with moments of dusty reasons for the crossing.

Touched by the spirit of adventure . . a slight wobble lofts into the sky
leaning against the wind bidding farewell to the straight rows of habit
lining pockets filled with kleenex and candy clappers beating time.

Returning its arc without complaint, barely can the whisper of need
be heard above a wall of moving stone separating earth into twin
resolves, the one furrowed the other stemmed, pressed into a look

of concentration. The cane says it all, wildly supposing intentions
land here, like scattered seed shattered at the moment of impact
or there, where nervous twitches of hydrangea leaf beckon.

Beneath your weight, tendrils of uncertainty calculate the distance,
shadow is never still . . . . always in furious motion . . . .crowding the
light, calling to its mate across an expanse of crevice-filled texture

until the moment comes when the sun stops, fixed in the sky,
and the gnomon moves ever so slowly about the hours, and
the wheat is lifted from the press of earth and the sky falls away.

I see you in a world of now . . . .thoughts passing over the morning
table where empty rooms of calendar cast slow shadow's fall upon
the colored bottles and old napkins averaging the precession of days

into a single ripple of event, a few simple movements of free habit
stir the need to find one object more enchanting than another,
held to its familiarity with things tumbled, sorted, spilled or made.

Upon the noon mark a strange event sits in the half-light, trying
to recall itself from things of need, forgotten hunger or idleness that
once knocked the pegs of hours into soup bowls and lunch plates;

now the dinner bell does not chime, a phone in the silverware drawer
calls to the lunch tray above it, its corner pealed back and forgotten
from where you sit and gaze upon a centerpiece of old newspaper

muffling the voice that has all but given up teasing you into looking
for something that happened yesterday . . . . . chords of analemma cross
each other when the microwave timer rings and nothing returns.

Through a cover-glass in early evening light among silent streaks
of falling gold, I see the shadows rise reluctant from their pool of play
upon a large white sofa, like a grey cat unfolding from your lap,

stretching into leaves of cornered philodendron, dusting over chairs
as they advance the ease of night's transparency in blues and deep
rose samples from a canvassed frame of violet hues, self-portrait

staring from the wall . . . aware and silent . . . its secrets held close
in mute compliance with immutability, a pastel past forbidden
to the pallet of a room preparing for a late afternoon display,

a hand-wrought chalice rising from some vague Cellini thought,
silvery shadow's fingers trace upon a cup such serpentine events
which you alone embrace . . . meaning in a veiled face . . . specks of gold

that linger in the embering sunlight, portraiture of such simplicity,
having neither beginning nor end . . . . its moment just the line between
the scraps of thens where the passing day neither yellows nor blushes

its whens into markers . . its studies into practice . . filling lists with
boxes and boxes with sorts . . . . its endless replacements of then
are but moments between a gazing wall and the dog barking

- a splash of rose and gold across your lap . . . . . . a door closing.

And now, when time has fled the immobility of artificial light,
within a drawer, upon a shelf. . .. .things that speak to you alone,
to no one else. . .sometimes just the play of light upon the wall

family pictures that have jumped their frames. . .names faded,
daughters become sisters, strangers washed by a single season's
passing rain. . . .a story for the sake of story a photo of a photo


of a sleeping boy in tangled yarn.. . .'John Gorowulu,' I might say,
'the boy you taught to read so long ago'. . . .his laughter, his gentle
tribal way. Then, you were 'Peace Corps Ma', but merely wonder


now at unremembered days. . .your eyes a shade of mist. . . .a steady
gaze upon a rainy lake. . .drops that fall and disappear. . .erased,
and only tiny motions of your fingers betray your knack for knotting

(surprised at your forgotten boldness in your street-art days
as I told you of the night you spent in a foggy San Francisco jail,
for the sake of art you wove defiance into pride, a rough display)

strands of jute or viscose straw woven into autumn's macramé
with picot handles strong enough to lift the trailing years
of knots - chain, sinnet, hitch or bend - to weave motifs in cotton

blending then and now to brilliant ending colors. Knot-Bearer, don't
waste a precious moment's skein looking about for some holding-
thread to follow home. Would lake wonder cloud? Splash doubt rain?

I see the dust disturbed beneath a juggling clown. . . .standing
his silent round of music box, waiting for the cue to start the show;
turning a tiny circle, circusing above the din of kitchen clatter.

I can almost hear him say, "Ladies & Gents, we'll now begin."
arrange the troupe in red and blue. . .shoes big and small. . .noses,
grins. . . .juggling, tumbling. . . .hair on fire!, pants on fire!. . .Liar! Liar!

The circus goes round and round

the clowns begin to dance!

Oh Ringmaster, there's something missing here. . . . unnamed
perhaps a momentary shock. . .as if a root, now freshly severed
from its stalk, claimed the earth by eminent domain. . . . .Laugh,

while our circus falls away like laminae that shield brute surprise,
we see a circus long ago when your hand, through instinct's eye,
would grasp a larger version of itself in unquestioned intimacy;

for what was to wonder at the tall length of strange Indian
offering a replica of tethered familiarity in an open maze
of confusion, animal smells, footsteps of giants trampling florets

of flattened popcorn and sinking feelings in the pit of sticky
cotton-candied palms pressing against a hot, dry midway
(you'd not seen an Indian before). Why does this feel wrong?

Though we think it but a moment, hear no fall of heavy canvass
flap under the platforms of dog-boys and barking oddities,
no gypsy music to cover the dank smell of pin-light in a dark'd pit.

Nothing like that, but the rescue holds our interest, disengages
from the Indian to question spidery things hiding in the mirage
of family and seeds of passivity sown in fields of ripening scorn,

the snatchy needs of the last-born, shackling her siblings
to the burdens of responsibility - sure to bring out the worst
in them and, for you, the allure of shame that came so naturally

with assignment as the 'baby of the family'; a role forever trapped
within its own cruel circularity - panic over resentment - shaken
and scolded by angry litanies of relief until the inevitable return

of the next empty tether and the cry of Other, 'Where's my sister?'
your needs burden, your offerings occasion jealousy, the good-child
made bad-enough, the unbroken spirit, a hand forever letting go

proudly retreating into the sufficiency of self-doubt, goodness
that separates, insinuates, takes aim with rage, blaming arrows
that burrow into fractures of 'baby sister' with their own brand of pain.

With each rejection there is one less place to hide the pride-torn scars
of teasings, scoldings, clothes that don't quite blend, abandonments
that won't quite mend - Indian gone. . . .circus vanished - Ringmaster,

bring on the elephants, call in the clowns:

The bossy balloon lady dressed in paper maché glaring
at the juggler sneaking looks (with every passing turn)
up the skirts of a tall black-haired doll (who simply looks away)

dwarfing the rolley-polley twins, good-mother/magic-mother
pair, distinguished only by the large yellow star painted around one
eye, nostrums for the taunt of "baby, baby!" haunting the years

of the youngest child, 'liar! liar!. . .No circus here'. . . .last walkabout,
the house silent as a fox in the tall grass of sleep, 'have a good
sleep' lights out - the juggler's music box takes a small bump-in-the-dark,

dada da.da dada.daa;. . . put-on a-hap..py-fa..c..e.

The balloon lady Hrummphs!

You study nothing. . .it studies you back. . . .an open book turned
to a black lacquered page from which you speak a dialect
of chinese lantern calling forth silent orange blossoms

that fall beside your bedside in the manner of silk undressing
the wind. One by one you receive such ministers as a sleeping
body has to offer and return their queries without comment,

reports of certain frailties and complaint being far too remote
against the starless gesture of the sky to anticipate repair.
Even the common moonrise is excused from further excursion

above the horizon and, remains a cloistered abbess within
the priory of hours. . . .in perpetual eclipse. . . .a solitary
frame in a Muybridge study of its own background, one dark frozen

action forever lagging a moment before or after another
equally dark frozen action. . .separated only by the naked
perplexity of sky bereft of its own sky, now falling into

the interstitial spaces between frozen frames, hard as
glacier, speaking the dialect of sky to its companions
without symbols or sequence, spectacle or cathexis.

Sky listens with the ear of night for the lowest registers
of question. . .you have none to offer. . .none answer back;
the family, en tableau, a samovar perhaps, moon-blind

in self-illumined approximation, shiny and inauthentic,
their newness gives them away. . .not a wobble, a cliff,
a broken doll, a strange Indian, . . . . .not even an extra chair.

You are spectator adrift with paper lanterns. . .wheat sleeps
under your bed. . .vulnerable places of old softened ground,
blackened with age. . . . . . . .compost, where the same seeds

are quickened night after night, cannot resist the slightest
rain of sleep dropping on the page to suddenly blossom into
dialects even lanterns do not understand. . . .Faces peer from

walls. . . .have no apparent agenda. . . .no dwarfed and misshapen
menacing. . .a simple, "Go Away!" sufficient to erase. . .to call
the messengers scurrying through the abbey with its mazes

of damp tunnel. . .a shiny floor, an unlocked door. . .room of phantoms
(for which no key can be found) yellow. . .red. . .blue lines crisscross
through corridors of lanterns hurrying to return before dawn;

dogs park by the garbage truck in the courtyard, the bin
clangs, the gardener turns on the sprinklers, the beacon
light on the gate goes out at the first slope of dawnlight,

First eyes open. . . .the trees are waiting. . .tall and lithe,
pines gathering around your bed, on top of the covers,
shaking their branches, sending roots deep beneath

the mattress feeling blindly for unsprouted wheat. Once
anchored they can be ignored. . . .one foot follows the other
to the cautious floor. Underfoot a lantern blossom pops.

Iron tables and curved hooks appear to bar the way to the door,
you turn the page. . .white matte. . .bits of bark and fungus,
the wind slips into a gesture and tightens the sash about itself,

the last embers of dying lanterns fall into the sea and go out.

The sun stops. The world of now is a long journey. . .the smallest
step from one brief station to the next, a journey through elliptic
silence where voiceless messengers appear from time to time

announcing arrivals and departures of sweaters and toothbrushes,
hand lotions or potted plants. . . . .Yet it persists by step,
by step do you move through new joys of old crackling leaves,

the doors opening and closing, the books opening and closing,
the meals coming and going, mysterious knobs and handles,
items like ghosts. . . .time like strangers' voices speaking clock

and thieves, who steal canes and eyeglasses, lunches and hairpins,
appointments,. . . .yesterdays that lie in conversational ambush
disguised as questions, highwaymen that will force you to open

your purse (missing since Tuesday) and discover its emptiness
among the flowers and ducks, the Wednesday night readings,
the tied shoes and found canes, the paragraph you are reading

on improving your memory from a book you once used for lectures
you gave to names you remembered and faces you brightened
and the purses you opened for the world you taught and taught

them to open. . . .to know about things that asked questions,
to be one who knows. . .just as you know the way of the dancers
upon the soft powdery rings of night's meridian. . .to be gnomon

free of its moment in the sun. . . .to walk among horizon's hours
and the children with names written in the sky that falls away
while you and they set free the wheat of the world in the wind

where I see you through an eye of grass. . . .tall tall the children blow
their words of freedom through the hair-tossed fields. . .as you turn
the hours' sheave to move the sky. . . . .their songs set free.

Glimpses (fr. Stewards of Mortality)

©Red Slider, 1998, 2006 all rights reserved.

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