space
Nights like this when the moon’s near-full
its cold light blends with hard breezes
roaming down the state from the brute distance,
Edmunton Clippers crashing against our trees’ reef.
Together moon and wind suffuse the garden with
time’s stony duration, all those snowy mountain
peaks so vastly alone in moonlight
that also makes a black mirror of the seas.
Cold and old and nothing personal,
simply including me as it sit outside
feeding our black cat at 3 a.m.
and watching our garden sway
in that grander elemental sweep
which our time poorly names
though we are caught in it,
carried along by galactic winds,
out planet and moon and Sun
paper boats on an almost-eternal tide.
Things seem so becalmed here
but hard clutter is faintly meshed
on the tails of this breezy moonlight,
colder than the morning’s cool,
or burning where no fire’s seen,
whispering of events that could
take all this away like
a tsunami racing inland:
Syria spinning into maelstrom,
Israel aiming its rockets at
Iranian nuclear installations,
the Grecian economy collapsing
taking Europe in its wake,
glaciers pouring cascades
of icemelt in the sea.
None of that is visible or
even prescient in that moonlight
yet like the high moon’s aura
darkness burns inside the known,
lucence ramping all its wattage
from dark ramparts and sieves
bleeding invisibly all night.
A million Haitians suffering cholera,
a hundred Congo women raped last night,
A Russian journalist reporting on Putin
beaten almost to death while his wife watches,
three fingers cut off, each a tongue lost.
Eastern Europe’s buried under ice
and the garden’s perfect in brilliant moonlight
waving like sea-grass in the breeze.
One shift where I sit and
Mamacita races off into the dark,
finished enough, every hackle
of her dark-do-darkest fur
raised to all I do not know
but also fear as I lock the door
coming back inside
to tend what I can
as time floods off like a melting glacier,
dropping history on us
from a distant, almost silent drone.
February 2012
space
Women and children taking refuge from Syrian Army shelling in the city of Homs.
Perhaps we only fear when we love, and to the same extent? Sometimes I think that cold wave needs to come, the pandemic, the scouring nuclear winter, to change the dynamic irrevocably from all that brokenly persists in the now we inhabit(as per your list of staggering cruelties and wrongs.) But your garden stronghold of sanity and calm, that is worth fearing for. You set the mood beautifully in the first stanza and then execute consistently all through the sense of trying to protect a candle flame in a hurricane. The fifth stanza–”darkness burns inside the known” is simply glorious writing, the glow in that black void that makes it worth keeping one’s eyes open. Fine poem, B.
Thanks H — You’re probably right about the cold wave tsunami-style, the Big One, the necessary wildfire of events that clean away all the accumulated underbrush of snarled events — if only to remind us why it’s so important to work on what is broken rather than suffer their abyssal fall. OK, tortured metaphors, but the breakdown of things seems so inevitable and worst for the real suffering that none of us will be able to avoid. Til then I feed cats and tend garden and love what I can … B
You reflect my own thoughts and feelings this week, but are able to articulate them quite beautifully in spite of the grievous terror and ugliness. One foot after the other, one word upon another word, loving into the next day. What else can be done?
Thanks Ruth — and not much, really, can be done, though the shared tenor of the times is a form of witness, I suppose. Showing that we volunteered. – B