from a collage by Marsha Connell
And the slender necks of wooden geese drink from a vessel.
Someone covered with the prayer shawl
sits on the crest of the vessel, the eroded edges of a cliff,
minarets, a passage through the mountains.
Wild geese, the size of houses, sleep on the landscape,
distant snow rosiated against the coming darkness.
Wind has eroded the cathedrals of the desert.
Sometimes, when the light is right, you can see distance cities
reflected in the surfaces of ponds. Stars, the city?
By naming things, we categorize them, they lose their magic.
Sometimes it is better when they remain unnamed
because they fit better into the matrix of things.
Separated, they become isolated,
like this flock of geese on a frozen landscape.
The woman under the prayer shawl, does she see herself?
Or does she see the faces of God? Or are they the same thing?
Fingertips emerge from beneath the shawl, feminine.
Our landscape is inadequate when it comes to terms of gender.
The darkness beneath the shawl, the human form extended
into the darkness of vessels. No one ever shows them
pouring out of the darkness. Maybe wine, perhaps water.
But the liquid takes on the properties of darkness
if stored long enough.
Perhaps this is why we dream of ourselves in the center of things,
not on the edges of the dream like the retina.
Inside the vision darkens the intensity of color and light
until it fades into the darkness.
I used to think the indistinct edges of things
was how the world was really formed, slovenly, haphazardly.
Images snapping to attention like soldiers under scrutiny.
It’s a takeoff of the idea that if a tree falls in the forest
and there’s no one to hear it, just the sound exist?
We cannot see sound waves—or radio waves for that matter.
If there’s no antenna to translate radio waves into sound,
the radio waves still exist. Somewhere in deep space
scientists are able to measure such distances.
Orson Welles’ voice in War of the Worlds
is still traveling deeper and deeper into space.
Is anyone out there listening?
Will the radio waves retain their original integrity,
or will they become corrupt like a computer file with time and use.
Does space use time, or does time use space?
A Mobius strip convoluted back on itself,
on the outer edges of the galaxy, only to return to its source,
finding no antennae to receive them.
On the slopes of Haleakalā, Maui’s house of the Sun,
a laser measures the distance of the moon.
Conclusion: the moon is drifting away from us.
On Haleakala, the Nene, or the Hawaiian goose no longer flies,
its feet are no longer webbed because it lost
the reason for webbed feet—water.
A goose out of water, unafraid of man, was nearly eaten into oblivion.
Rats jumped ship, and the mongoose brought here to prey on the rats
both prefer the eggs of indigenous birds to exotic species.
It’s the same old story the world over. Encrusted copper urns
too long beneath the sea, become thin and brittle with age.
The sea’s invisible fingers massage them into papery relics.
Barnacles colonize them, kick food into their mouths with feathered feet.
After a lifetime of standing on their heads,
what do they dream of on the edge of a vessel?
Summer 1991
No comments:
Post a Comment