by Jorie Graham
It’s like this. There are quantities. There’s ongoingness—
no—there’s an underneath. Over it we lay
time—actually more like takes and retakes by
mind (eyes closed) then clickings of
its opening-out and the mind fills
with gazes—thousands over some visualizations—or some
places if you wish—I wish—a few or no gazes over some
(because somewhere there must be a meadow with just suchgrasses
no gaze has touched)—(because it is
touch)—and other places where millions have laid down
their mental waters in this manner). Above and
below our gaze, I don’t know for sure—although I
believe there must be a truth—gravity lays,
is laid, in—like a color being washed over
the whole—a tint with a direction in it—
or rather a tint that places tiny arrowings,
or the sensation of pulling of being pulled over
all of the visualization—eyes open now—over
sky, blue, stonewall, vectoring grasses, three trees,
distance, close-up—all as if
being drawn-in without it affecting how.
If you open and close your eyes
there should be a difference, no, in the way
the thing seen is—in its weight?—and then
what the thinking has begun to make—which is
not the tint of gravity, nor the was of the ticking,
(what’s not there if we leave
altogether for example)—because there is, on it, which we’ve
somehow
introduced, this wash which is duration, a very
sturdy though of course not touchable fabric, and because
we can creep along it—or simply
count lengths back—because because of it there is a “back”—
not a back on the field itself but a back to the
thinking—which does begin now to apprehend the edges of
skeletal diminuendos of glancings as they
ascend the manifest up towards its upper reaches—soil,
timothy, stone, manyness of stone, non-mortared
build-up of it—
mistings of just-above-stone where the
two of them meet, manifest, un-manifest [and how they
could not
know who was looking at them][and that I was from
another country][down to the very movement of my lips]
[show me a word I can use][and how all that you say
is taken from you, they take it, just like
that, it becomes smoke] smoke rising here as mist off the heavy
topmost stones
of the wall, raised so carefully up from the field,
to make this edge of precarious positionings,
that make the suddenly-green silence actually hold still, hold
up—a kind of trophyto property, to the property of gravity—a waltz
of motions (fallings, tumblings) stilled—
a thing of number without a numbering—as if every
movement
of some gathering crowd’s lips were, having uttered each one
their one
request, cast forth into manifestation—slightly round with
syllable, then placed—a long wall of requests so carefully placed—
each almost pitiful with fear and desire—from each request the soil
scraped-off
where it’s dug-up
from the wide field it now defines, the hole
filling back in on itself—as the self fills in on itself—a
collectivity—a
god making of himself many
creatures [in the cage there is food][outside only the great
circle called freedom][an empire which begins
with a set table] and I should like, now that the last washes of my gaze
let loose over the field, to say, of this peering,
it is the self—there—out to the outer reaches of
my hand, holding it out before me now, putting it into where
my breath begins to whitely manifest my difference to
night air: look: it is a law: the air
draws on itself the self’s soft temperature:
it looks like rain: there is a beforehand: I brought
my life from it thus far: moments are attached.
The nets of the glance draw in. Some
admixture is caught. Some not. There is
impatience but not in the self alone. The open
has its own impatience. The edges fill with it
there where a voice is raised.
Anticipation pulls one way. Regret the other.
A smile can open or close the face. Blood
is almost touchable by sun. Footsteps bent the grass
a bit
to get us here. Looking behind
I see the lift in the bent weeds, I see in them
what cannot be conceived of—quite—I see it rise, erasing
path. As where a hand
clutches a wound, tightly, staunching the blood.
Why did we take this way? Where does this going
go? Maybe it can bend down now and shut its hand
over a stone. To toss it hard across the field. To have it
land somewhere. Exactly. Yes. Somebody
loves you. Elsewhere a people now is being forced
from home. Looking out, as dusk comes on,
no looking up or down anymore.Everything taken in as stone by grass.
Does one know
what one likes. What one is like. What is a feeling
in the heart. What troubles
the soul. What troubles the jonquils nearest me
as the light, the cage of this,
goes out. What is it that can now
step out. And is the open door through me.
Beyond us now, but close-in, nearby,
how near I cannot tell, around us, in us, near: the
sensation of beauty unseen; an owlet’s
cry;
a cry from something closer to the ground that’s uttered
twice and which I cannot name—although it
seems bright yellow in its pitch.
- Share this Poem:
