February 13th: Getting Out While it Snows: Thoughts While Shoveling
I came to crush time to study you to teach
Like a cloud drifting above you I darken everything I hide the sky
Crowned with lightning I save you with rain
Like That/Buddha
Stephen Berg
It’s been an inch an hour
for the past eighteen hours. Maybe
more. I’m nervous where to put it all.
I want to get out before the wind picks up
(or get in before the wind
picks up?) Before it picks up everything
I’ve moved and makes of all
the work my work a useless bread
dough that rises and falls
rises and falls and will never be baked.
How sensible is that? And
how sensible is this interruption: my footprints
are all filled in and I am the burnt end
of a blunt once again. I sleep during the worst
of it, the way any good apostle would. But let me
defend them, please, in their garden
of oil. They were in a blizzard too, weren’t they,
though who among them had shoveled such snow?
Below the least branches
in that olive grove they put out
their eyes to make it
all go away. None of them
could tell you what they dreamed though
it was nothing
destructive: it was a man
at the end of some road
and it was snowing. He’d gone
out early ahead of the plow.
He’d made his way
on foot. It took him a long time,
his entire life. His neck was stiff
bent against the wind. He wanted
a clear path
to do the work he’d always done
for her. There’s no way
to know if the road goes on.
There’s a boy beside him in the end
and when his heart opens
the boy lays him down
and it’s soft across it all.
The veins and capillaries slow down
the plows turn around lower their blade
and make a different way.
This is an apostle’s dream and
men who’ve never encountered such snow
are cold in their robes in their olive grove.
Their shoes have been stolen.
They have no knives. They are at the mercy
and random whim of bandits,
and are unprepared for walking.
They push their shoulder
into the trunk of the dream
and their master
the one they’ll swear lead them here
the one they’ll swear they never knew
is kissed
and led away
the snow fills in his footprints
or was it sand?
It doesn’t matter.
What’s gone is gone
and what falls today in February
may stay
a day
a month
but eventually it evaporates
or sinks into the ground
the place where roads,
ending,
don’t do that at all--yet they don’t keep going either.
Nothing is certain
even being nailed to a tree
even cupping the falling sky
in bare hands in the warmest of mid-winter rain.
Even these lines--
if I look back
I won’t know my way
if I press my chest with all this snow
I may, briefly, see the good
in what I do before the wind blows it
randomly full.
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