FROM WHERE IMAGES BECOME IMBUED WITH TIME

Storm King Mountain

Chewing on a stalk of jimson weed,
looking down from Storm King Mountain
where the river flowed its columns of autumn colors,
Pete and I would toss small bits of granite like paperweights
out over the trees and listen to see if we could hear them coming back.
Once in awhile we did hear a distant clink
like the meshings of a gear coming into place;
a squirrel’s bright eye would leap from our fingers,
a barge of rusting iron would swirl about and pause on the river below.
It would be a dingy red square upon a blue ribbon
far removed from the sun igniting our valley.
Something dark is coming this way, he said.
I nodded, but what is a man to do.

There was a military academy below us.
There was Vietnam. There were heart attacks.
There were clocks with metal tongues counting our days.
There were gray faced women with gay lit bows
wrought in foreign shops by lives long locked away.
And the sun was beating down upon us,
so that we shed our shirts and began to burn;
Would it be so bad, we thought,
if something dark were coming this way,
when we could see it all so very well.
We have the time to plan;
We have a vista spread about us.
We can feel the roots of the earth taking hold.

We looked to the sunsets and waves of grain to our west;
even there along the marsh drawn margins of the river
where mallards and mergansers nest and long legged egrets
stretch between two cosmologies to pull coins from the waters
while wild rice rises into evenings catching fire along its flaring tips.
Deer fill the dreams of our suburban alleyways,
always moving, shifting shadows at the edge of sight,
and wild maidens clasp them to their hearts, run bare-legged
into thickets of desire we cannot understand but will come to cope with.
Why would it be hard with all these flames of life
swaying with the waves of autumn and a rising sun:
if something dark were to come this way, it would be filled with light.

In time, a shirt turns into a thousand pounds of metal at 80 miles per hour.
It turns into thirty tons of metal at 100 miles per hour.
It turns into a factory of crushed stone where life sweats into the cellar seeps.
It turns into a lair built of fallen trees, wrought iron, and electric needles.
It becomes a game of rock-paper-scissors
where somehow the paper shears off mountainsides and cuts metal.
Shadows come crashing through our windowpanes
to take small pills at night from bedside tables;
And, yes, an older man needs to sleep sometimes while the world keeps up.
And, yes, I can sleep, and can still keep it up as well as any man:
even when something dark is coming toward us I am eager to pump light into it.
There is nothing gentle in a big black box barreling down a concrete river,
though its heart and soul and every shadow within its bulk is filled
with grains of the earth that could feed an endless multitude.
Not with the sun's rays igniting all it touches at 100 miles per hour
contained within the dark.

A Matter Of Degrees

Imagine a society of star-gazers
who know only that the lights in the sky are round
and that year after year and generation after generation
those spheres pull the seasons into place behind them
while grain grows in rows that reach up toward them;
they would see these as spherical as opposed
to that which is linear and finite
and dies;
and the wise among them say
it is the edges of these spheres that are important
because it is the edges that always come back upon themselves
and the seasons change greatly in their progression
but the edges change little through age;
it is those little changes that change all things.
And the wise then study the edges of the spheres,
and they stand with their backs to each other
scanning the horizon in areas where there is no grain,
finding that each step gives them a different unit to view,
and pivoting slowly three hundred sixty steps
inch by inch circuitously to find degrees of perception.

These star-gazers in their sheepskin coats
will grab at anything to remember. They will hammer rocks into pillars.
They will dig holes in the earth to melt down metal.
They will rip the skin of wild animals.
All to note down a system of 360 degrees that reaches out
toward those distant lights that control the warm spring rain.
Perhaps they will give degrees to each other.
They will study units until it is time to pass those units to another generation.
It too will go around in carefully measured steps.

Each unit will become a sphere
and each unit around that sphere will be another sphere.
The counting of 360s will be the counting of one.
Imagine that they build so many towers to reach out toward that one
that the earth becomes blanketed with metal walls and plate glass views of clouds.
Imagine then that they begin to hurl those towers themselves upward
forgetting that there is no upward in a sphere within a sphere
and that the stars are not indeed above them
but are in their very bones
back beyond time.

The Gates Are Set To Close

Across the green green grass of home, iron-barred
gates are drawing down in the name of Liberty;
I take these items from the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times
in the week of May 15th, 2005 in the year of our days:
more than 80 highway gates are initially to be installed
to lock Chicago residents inside the city in an emergency;
automated they will clank down to the tintype tune of homeland security
keeping inside what is bad and inside what is good in a suddenly frozen tableau;
and in Manhattan in turn tunnels and bridges will close
while police place little trinket locks on Washington Square Park at night
where the Times says "dissenters" tend to gather after dark,
and I used to sit long hours into the midnight music of folk guitar.

There are plans in place.
There are scenarios, and either way we go, you lose,
whether caged in bars or blown across the landscape.
I have no answer;
I do not know what cars come down our roads,
nor whose fingers turn what keys or send what impulse.
In this perfect storm we are covered with the ash of autumn
from four years and three thousand lives ago.
It is getting hard to breathe, America.

Fine Bone China

You were walking between the campus buildings
bright dreams and warm woolly jackets between the buildings
long hair brown in the sunlight blowing in the wind with books between the buildings
at Kent State
when sharp reports that would fill your years forever thudded into flesh
driving out the color of your eyes and the color of the children
you taught in your class
on American Literature: Philosophy of Romanticism
gunned down by the National Guard because they were carrying books
between classes on the campus of Kent State
instead of boxes of bullets in Vietnam.

You served me years later
bowls of home-made soup in your garden apartment in The Village;
and the soup was brewed from bones nestled in china,
from heavy American oxen from the Midwest
who lay down with a cleaver between their eyes
and filled the bowls you placed before us.

We couldn't fit our spoons down into the broth
between the bone and fine bone china.
They carried you away on Thorazine.