By Whose Authority
I Who are you?At first I am only breath in a bright room,
Always at first I am afraid, gone stiff and tender.
The wings crowd my throat,
And my fingers pluck and flutter at webs
In front of eyes looking for what I am
Hiding
A thing so simple
That I am ashamed for its sake that my body carries it
And that it is sacred.
That it is sacred.
Remembering that,
There rises in me a night, a lake, a silence
My body can move in
Finding the other.
You are the other,
Known to me from the first time I took breath
From inward light
Finding other forms for who you are.II What is your family?
Light as leaves, the only name I have,
No other given to me to hold
Down, a stone safe against wind or water
Or a sound to let go in the breath-shape of a ghost.
I've tried to find my name.
Holding quiet, I've heard the air talk
And the upland earth and the long sands.
I've learned how to listen inside
Cliff rock, beach rock, hill stone, shore stone, sure of
What screams in a raw wind turned on a point, knowing
What drones in the surf and drowns human voices
But I do not know how to call my familky here
Or even who they are.
Stranger.
What leaves, leaves
The breath of the land runs through
And weaves in a voice
With the white words of a stranger.
Without any name of power
What can I give?
What word-spell can I weave?
The wind comes back.
The steady sound of the sea grows less than it was.
I give what I have.
Breath in the leaves becomes a song.III Who is your teacher?
No one. Earth.
Dust. Stone. Dry midsummer's rubble.
When I was a child
Hunkered one day in warm dust to watch ants
About their work,
As if remembering a dead life,
I knew I was myself the dust they lived in
And that they were the seeds of my death.
I know the will of my ribs and my skull to be earth again.
No one. Air.
The mounting heaven of day
That battens on promise and gathers prayer
And pours back radiant answers from bright cloudbanks
And deep heaven of night-atmosphere of the mind.
I used to reach my hands out over the sill.
A responding spirit filled them with flakes from stars.
I trust the lifting of breath to ask. Something spills back.
No one. Water.
Sounding or still.
I was a sullen child
Pitched into thought by the cold
Rankling my heart
Until I gave way at last at the edge of the sea.
My silence balanced against that massive water.
The ocean flogged her breakers, glint and sparkle
Rinsing and rinsing the shale
And raveling back.
One icy silver-water, earth and sky-
That fell everywhere and hung falling everywhere,
Pulse of all things living solved to one,
And I was one.
I live by raveling water everywhere.
No one. Fire.
A sweet flame flickering runs beneath my skin.
Pale as I am, I color, rosy with love.
My limbs tremble. The bravest thing
Would be to raise my eyes and face his eyes
I am near to fainting. Parched. Suffused with fire.
There is likeness, but fire does not seem the same
As the thundering flames that poured in waves
Breaking around the attic and the upstairs rooms
Of the great house on North Avenue.
Red ravened, brighter than blood against the moon.
Crimson behind the blackened window frames
Roared like a wind.
I could see the heavy curtains afire
And the bed, the table beside it, the iron lamp
Standing in fire, all rising consumed,
Flaring into darkness
Under fiercely played hoses.
Old Isaac lived there.
I was the child he led up charred stairs
In the morning to scorched books,
The wet wood reeking of smoke.
Over the dead house at night, the stars swung,
Burning.
There is fire from Heaven not like that conflagration,
The page quiet underneath the hand,
And in the mind, flames wavering around dreams, consuming them-
The synapse, the distance bridged, the closing.
It is the same fire.
Fire is my teacher.