Legacy of Blue
Blue of contusion, blue of the sea at noon
summers when thunderheads build on the thin line
the horizon comes down to; blue of Mary’s gown
standing beside her son in agonies
ten thousand times across the Renaissance.
None of this will give me back the man
my father was to me: blue his last chair,
a sort of Swedish modern with matching footstool.
There he sat, looking for my mother in a sky
Michigan unfurled for him eleven months
and then he left to me, like Mother, to these words.
I started with words; all words are wounds,
no, they are clouds; they refuse to hold the son.
Reader, I wanted to say: a father is every man’s first man.
* * * * *
Incarnations
I
Don’t count it heaven, the light between the trees.
It’s only heaven’s presaging, like these,
the sparrows I fall back on when I write,
the little wings in the drain’s rainwater gold
in front of my house. When I kneel down here now,
where they drip their twitterings to be transformed
I’m at the edge of the Transfigurations,
leaf-clogged, detritus- and shit-clogged.
II
You have to dredge to find the ordinaries
or pull them down from branches that their wings spread,
the branches wider so we see through to skies,
shattering the ones we’ve circumscribed
by our belief in dimensions we have heard.
There’s singing there we hear and then let go.
That’s how incarnation comes. It releases us —
* * * * *
Incarnation Intercept Sonnet
It’s always heaven
I won’t see again
in this life, the light
flaming between trees,
live oaks establishing
my yard’s horizons.
But to keep vision
intact, I stand back,
asking nothing of it
but the sun’s stance
on the diurnal,
incarnation’s probe
of recurrence,
that fire I walk through.
* * * * *
Riven, Driven Back
We have these mornings
we are born again.
We have some others
breaking through our eyes,
showing us yesterdays,
tomorrow’s tomorrow,
all dull green Edens,
Adam, Eve, the snake
dun assemblages.
But in happenstance
begins miracle.
Look, this one sunbeam
breaking on my floor
splays a world in place.
The flaming sword, gate,
cherubim watching.
I can make a day
out of the unknown,
nakedness, two trees,
and my own terror.
I can walk backwards.
Ready, Paradise?
* * * * *
Jacob’s Ladder
My soul has taken in the clear, cold light
paradise offers when we have lost enough —
parents, lovers, children, friends, directions back —
then we are alone with the Alone again,
our witness to all things we find in changingness.
Aloneness has its own music, it digs in heels
to ladders lowered from the unseen clouds.
It raises wings to scale the rungs, ascend, descend —
musics we’ve never heard, angels expressionless
until we face them, choose to give one face.
What profiles we exchange then in our rise and fall!
What company we keep! Am I going up or down?
Transversals, circles, zigzags, parallelograms?