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Mayo 1, 2007
A Day on the Connecticut River
The billionth-or-so dawn,
And yet how primitive
The little factory looks, upstream,
Its brickwork that of "early man"
Launched and paddling through creation's
At-a-stroke venerable inventory
Baked into clay banks, bedded onto stone,
The day meanwhile our own.
Tire after scuttled tire
Glides under the canoe,
Manholes of a twilit avenue.
Better admire
The tannin-tinted clarity
—An opal freckle? A bug's wing—
Dimpled, asway, working
Cures for singularity,
Each view, to its least defect,
Flawlessly duplicated, healed . . .
Or was that last cornfield
Greener in reflection than in fact?
Duck! Museum
Skylight lowers
Like a boom. Through bowers
Of the no-see-um
One broad-bowed solo
Chord subtending, now,
Brindled cow,
Barn and silo,
Carries the Ur-
Conceptualist further
Into mimesis:
Life ever truer
To life, begun
Afresh with a few like-minded species,
While the rest of our whizzes
Down Route 91
Whose traffic drone
(Or falls ahead?
Stay, reconnoiter
This white water—)
Yields to the eternal
Drumming of bees
In a noon tree's
Bleached bone.
Ah but, our zenith passed, my friend,
Two galley slaves, retracing a dead end
Of scum-glaze, lilypad, Atari dragonfly,
We're cuffed alert by headwind—empty sky—
Miles from a landing—every pulse a mean
Swipe of the palette knife—painstaking sheen
In jeopardy—the master's touch lost—sun
Cross-questioned, mutely reddening—damage done:
What good's "eternity" if it won't get
Us anywhere in time to build a fire
And pitch a tent and heat our stew before
Night falls, and share a final cigarette
Whereby new-smelted leads of the moonrise
Nonplus the prowling far-off headlight eyes,
And twin dreams fumble, enter and earth chill,
Shadow and cave, for on another—? Still
Once more in the event
All came to pass
First light. Then, piece by piece,
Exact scales weight the fortune lent
On such fair terms. From clay,
Cuneiform cliff swallows whistling dart—
Transaction noted here, in part—
Up and away.
James Merrill
Posted by sarita at Mayo 1, 2007 5:51 PM