Chapter One The Precision There is a modesty in nature. In the small of it and in the strongest. The leaf moves just the amount the breeze indicates and nothing more. In the power of lust, too, there can be a quiet and clarity, a fusion of exact moments. There is a silence of it inside the thundering. And when the body swoons, it is because the heart knows its truth. There is directness and equipoise in the fervor, just as the greatest turmoil has precision. Like the discretion a tornado has when it tears down building after building, house by house. It is enough, Kafka said, that the arrow fit exactly into the wound that it makes. I think about my body in love as I look down on these lavish apple trees and the workers moving with skill from one to the next, singing. Variously Us Something breaches the ocean of doctrine, heaving sideways amid the splattering and squall. Our assumptions harpooned into the storm of being. The heft and slop of consciousness beginning inside what we call our life. And below, under the roaring dark, is the silver sheen and scale of silence. The spirit apart. The whale of us gathering color to itself all the gradations between black and white according to what depth and the degree of transparence. Rising and falling back. Faith translated into muscle and invisible bone. We and it joined like the scene painted over and over on the ancient Athenian vases of a man struggling with a fierce-jawed lion. The ship of us battened down in the storm of mystery. Always refracted. We are lashed to our body. Swamped in the loving, the pods of prayer, the seeds of finally. Hot blood breathing far down, the harpoon of the mind wedged in us, shaping. Alone with the Goddess The young men ride their horses fast on the wet sand of Pangaritis. Back and forth, with the water sliding up to them and away. This is the sea where the goddess lives, angry, her lover taken away. Don't wear red, don't wear green here, the people say. Do not swim in the sea. Give her an offering. I give a coconut to protect the man I love. The water pushes it back. I wade out and throw it farther. "The goddess does not accept your gift," an old woman says. I say perhaps she likes me and we are playing a game. The old woman is silent, the horses wear blinders of cloth, the young men exalt in their bodies, not seeing right or left, pretending to be brave. Sliding on and off their beautiful horses on the wet beach at Pangaritis. The Calves Not Chosen The mind goes caw, caw, caw, caw, dark and fast. The orphan heart cries out, "Save me. Purchase me as the sun makes the fruit ripe. I am one with them and cannot feed on winter dawns." The black birds are wrangling in the fields and have no kindness, all sinew and stick bones. Both male and female. Their eyes are careless of cold and rain, of both day and night. They love nothing and are murderous with each other. All things of the world are bowing or being taken away. Only a few calves will be chosen, the rest sold for meat. The sound of the wind grows bigger than the tree it's in, lessens only to increase. Haw, haw the crows call, awake or asleep, in white, in black. Calamities: Another Eden Out beyond what we imagine. Out beyond the familiar, leaving home and being homeless. Breaching the seas, foundering on a coast in the West, searching along coastlines in the Far East. The heart is left and leaves, stands in each part of the farness away from the other. Living in each particular moment of the day, of present claims and the careless claims of always. The ocean pushes out, pushes the heart into the unknown, toward the middle of a self that yearns and remembers. The spirit is rejected and walks slowly out of another Eden. An Eden that is not the heart, is homelessness, is isolate. The heart is gathered into the familiar nothingness and held. Is held and sent forth. In the way a seal drops into the water, sliding like oil in its element. Turns and rolls. What we call happiness. The seasons change and change, west and east, tropical and far northern. What we call love. Heaven is deep and deeper. We leave and leave into the questing. The Center of Intent Is there a lesson in the way this new silence lasts? Is it like the river's genius for making the water the same shape constantly as it pours between these two boulders? Is there some reason why the bird is always hungry and the body never gone? What explains the odor of the sea grass here? Why must we bow down, yield to the flowering? Maybe love is the Lord's trap. Maybe He sees us as the tree leaning over the stream. Perhaps He can't experience the difference between our pain, our loneliness, and the heron flying through the special silence at evening. Not a Pretty Bird She was not a nightingale as the Greek said. Philomela was a woman. The sister of the new wife. Raped, tongue cut out by the husband. Locked away. Not a swallow, not the bird of morning and late evenings that end so swiftly. Not a myth. She was a girl. That is the story: the empty mouth, the bloody breasts. The outrage. Not the transformation. She Writes to the Man Who Writes of Her in His Poems You tried to hide me in darkness, tried to live half of your time with me in the dark. You invented me. Finally went back to your people. Were obedient. Were received with praise. But in the supermarket you suddenly needed to know where I was. Turned to face each direction of the universe there in the aisle. But nowhere did anything return to you. I am here in this morning with your picture on the table, leaning against a vase of flowers. (One of them has fallen in my sleep.) A bird is singing, repeating itself over and over. And over. The Spirit Neither Sorts nor Separates There is a flower. We call it God. It closes and opens and dies. We still call it God. There is a stone that does nothing and is still God. Everything is of Heaven. There is mud around the edge of the pond. There are reeds, water lilies and a few dragonflies. The pond is light and dark and warm because of the sun. Hidden fish. The air itself. The bush outside is full of three and four kinds of birds. Winter birds instead of leaves. The snow over ground is enough. The birds hopping and feeding and departing are flowers, a mouth singing, your heart the way it was. Copyright © 1999 Linda Gregg. All rights reserved.
