Holy Heathen Rhapsody Read Online Free Page A

rises on an open
    sea, move with the same slow push and pause
    a trout uses to tread snow water, the same delve
    and release of a bird’s tongue in a flume
    of honeysuckle. Sinking and returning over
    and over, I want to go with him backward
    into the balm of stars, forward into the bible
    of sun, swing through and behind the blind
    bone mask together, out and beyond the cold
    marble eyes, crossing and crossing back with him
    in my arms until the name of any crossing,
    the fear of any crossing, ceases to matter,
    ceases to be, fall clear to the bottom of a death
    with him, then rise together, saved by
    that motion, and made whole, and restored.



NEW VOCABULARY
    It might be possible to disregard
    the silent hiss of an open-mouthed
    possum immobile on her silver back
    in the forest leaves, and it might be
    possible to view with indifference
    the kite-like ears of a doe
    hesitant at the edge of a sallow
    muskeg, or the white, fleeing rumps
    of over-the-prairie pronghorn.
    Some people might never notice
    the mating finch, the crimson
    chimmer of his call, and some might
    find it easy to dismiss the heaving
    ribs of a spiny lizard at pause,
    one forefoot raised, easy to pass by
    indifferent to the ruffled blur
    of a sage grouse rising
    from the dusty brush.
    And I can allow that not everyone
    should be impressed with the unbalanced
    and beadled claws of the ghost crab
    or the multi-doored mound of a single
    banner-tailed rat.
    But the eyes met straight-on—
    whether coyote yellow or sizzling bird-
    bead of black metal, whether the tilted
    study of gleaming lizard grain,
    or the clear gray marble of seal,
    or the dark unflickering candle
    of fox—the eyes, nailhead-tenacious,
    star-steady, searing as salt, unrelenting,
    fierce pinions from far foreign realms,
    surely no one can ignore being thus
    so found and fixed, so disassembled,
    so immediately redefined.

VULNERABLE AND SUSCEPTIBLE
    We are vulnerable to blindness caused
    by the absence of light: snow-filled fog
    along a frozen river at night, smoke stack
    smoldering black clouds across the sun,
    a burlap sack pulled over the head, fastened
    with rope at the neck, eyes open inside
    searching the weave for any pinpoint of day.
    Death can happen by such blindness
    when the lantern begins to flicker and dim
    deep in a cave, fades, fails, and one is crawling now,
    hands and knees on damp rock. All the cells
    of the body—gut, fingertips, ends of the hair—
    are straining to see. The nose sniffs for light.
    King Harold II was blind to death, killed
    by an arrow through his eye.
    Once I saw a blind girl come to her door,
    who couldn’t see me as I stood on her lawn
    watching the gray in the center of her brown
    eyes, who, inside her blindness, saw in the stillness
    how I held my breath to stay unseen, both
    of us staring, susceptible to the absence of sight.
    It can make the mind crazy to think of it:
    how the generous light of the sun can penetrate
    the eyes like a searing sword so harshly
    brilliant that it creates total darkness, blinding,
    cutting and killing, at the same time, sight
    and the source of its own name.
    Some, though having no eyes, are not blind.
    The mimosa is not blind to the sun, leaning
    upward toward its travel all day and also not blind
    to the rain, swelling at its coming. Each blind
    leaf partners with the eyeless wind.
    Blindness is considered a virtue
    in Justice, who has eyes we’ve never seen.
    In a moment last spring, I was so vulnerable
    to the call of a courting finch high on the roof
    that I held in my hand unseen
    not the bird but the sound of the bird.
    The spiritual are susceptible to what is seen
    in blindness. Closing their eyes, they can see
    the cleaved stone in the spiral of the dayflower,
    the green seed in the voice of night. Sometimes
    they see (and therefore believe) the blind
    god of the beginning whose closed eyes,
    upon opening, created light.

THE BLIND BEGGAR’S DOG
    Mangy bitch, emaciated,
    old