"And then I tested the waters of forgiveness.."
More Perihelion:
Bob Sward's Writer's Friendship Series
Six Entries on the Invention of Paper
1
It begins with a wasp on a terrace in ancient China:
2
Perhaps he has found bamboo too uneven
3
When his neighbor calls to him, “Ts’ai Lun,
4
His neighbor sees thin sheets of pulp strewn
5
One evening after an inquisition at court—
6
On a table lie stacks of the white sheets.
For Years
I kept the secret hidden from myself; I put it in the feather
_______________________________________________________________ "Dwell Nowhere and Bring Forth the Mind"
The Diamond Sutra
But I am most afraid of nowhere. It's the vortex of crows
of crying. House without walls. Speckle in the black
To dwell with color is to risk—
lessons. Snow Drops breaking ice in the garden.
my yellow fence. Blackberry in my tea, ochre brine
This hunter green bed and this white oak table. _______________________________________________________________ Monologue
You're wasting time. Your lilac needs pruning. By the shed,
I remember your lemon summers, a table set by a stone wall, peaches
You have forgotten how to laugh. Tongue in ear. Toes on thigh.
We didn't know what would follow. Ice storms out of season.
Others picked ravaged apple blossoms and put them in a blue vase,
The stones are tired of hearing your story. Bitter, bitter the crows
late afternoon, now that your legs will carry you. Go ahead: take
Feel the silt slide across hair follicles rising like milkweed. _______________________________________________________________ The Raymond-Harrington House, 1872
Large enough to shelter four families, tall enough to eclipse the sun
the new mansion thrusting against our fence, a mix of catamaran
foot mud perimeter for a yard. Stone wall, forsythia, giant honeysuckle
is wrapped for another blacktopping of its root system. Thoreau and Emerson,
to a writers' conference and no one wanted to speak in words, to think about words.
Asked my reaction, I could say nothing. I could not count fast enough.
the absence of tonality. I was deafened by hammers and saws,
the rhythm of spaces. The unsayable is always being said in one way
to destroy what has already been built. But even words do not capture the my
Jonathan Harrington fought on April 19th on the Lexington Green and died
the land on this street where the work crews start pounding at dawn.
_______________________________________________________________
From The Paper Wasp
a man invents paper after watching the wasp
spin its white nest from mulberry bark.
for letters in black wax.
Perhaps he is weary of verticality.
Perhaps he is ashamed of his private longings.
what are you boiling in that large pot?”
he does not show him linen rags found in a basket,
old fish nets hauled off the docks,
mulberry bark stripped from the neighbor’s tree.
across the terrace, drying in the sun.
He does not perceive them as treasures.
He is annouyed with the clutter.
His children are forbidden to set foot on the terrace.
He whispers about Ts’ai Lun in the tea shop.
The inventor has been implicated in palace unrest—
Ts’ai Lun comes home, drinks poison, and goes to bed.
The mulberry tree looks seamless in the moonlight.
The wasp is poised to devour some workers at dawn.
In my cap. I wore it to the masquerade. To my audience
With the Emissary. Humility shone from it like rhinestones.
I was invited to serve, to applaud. It weighed nothing,
Sunlight on a diploma. It had the scent of roses—dark
Red roses—in the hands of a diva. Spring air was ragweed
And bottled clapping. My hands ached from clapping. Once
A wind with ripped clouds fluttered into my small room;
The feather was flayed open, a peacock's tail. Clefts
And gaps destroyed its smooth symmetry, its silky flame.
My secret was there on the white spine. Perched on the back
Of my chair. Ragged as a dead owl. Luminous dragonfly
Sex in the garden. It hadn't saved me; it had silenced me.
What veins reside in stones, what ore in the floorboards.
Tiny as a buttercup, unyielding to hammer and ruler,
The whispered phrase I want settled on my tongue,
A fly in honey. Look how the legs broke apart, a messy
Splintered impurity sinking out of reach. Even tweezers
Failed. In the garden the stones were slick with rain. The hall
Vibrated with doors slamming. I want had nothing to argue,
Nothing to prove. It learned it must balance
On the rim of the china bowl, neither seen nor heard.
A crusty cyst just under the skin, swelling with fluid,
It needed to be popped. Child alone in the courtyard.
Burnt bramble of war reduced to prolonged cruelty.
Welcome relief: no napalm, no gas, no toxin, no gun to the head.
A name in a field of a million graves. A poppy blown off course.
No known perpetrators, no guilt. Shame more filthy than fact. I can't,
Of course, remember: God is merciful. I am so humble.
And then I tested the waters of forgiveness: I could not swim.
To doggy paddle like a Labrador, head barely above the surface,
In March on the pond; skimped ice milk left on the porch.
A dog, yes, a dog matters, though no one knows he's slipped out
Of the gate, attracted to the pond by scent of piss and squirrel.
Under in minutes. Unless someone hears the barking. Unless tree
Limbs hold him up. Unless a hapless stranger with a good heart
Hikes into the field and down to the pond, uninvited, thinking
Fault lines in the ice invite carp. And who would forgive him
If he stayed on shore? Who should I forgive, the dog who almost
Drowned the man, or the man who wouldn't save the dog—
Or the one who never locked the gate?
when abruptly they rouse off the ground. That kind
expanse that did not become a star. The sutra instructs
But I've worked hard to learn the simplest earthly
A tint of lavender in the Russian sage blooming against
on the cup. Perhaps to dwell somewhere for now.
There's not enough time—
split birch rots, the compost is amuck in rancid rainwater.
in a basket with white napkins. Tart apples and Stilton on plates.
Your body, taut with expectation. Where did you put your body?
Microorganisms from the south, spores rising like blades of grass.
while you filled Italian hand-made journals with complaint.
pronounce mid-flight. You should hike down to the pond,
your clothes off : you are not special in your broken body.
Feet sinking in mossy sludge, you will swim because you have to.
late morning, maker of shadows a shade garden connoisseur would covet,
and state prison, has shredded Japanese cherry trees and left a fifteen
Philip Freneau might have immortalized, gone. The Civil War sycamore
one town over, would have had one word, excess. I dreamed I had gone
It had become fashionable to push small white beads together on a wooden plate.
Mark Strand walked out of the conference, and others, too. Some loved the codes,
the Caterpillar jaws spewing asphalt. I tried to sound things out, to capture
or another. One needs a permit to build, a license. One needs a variance
in “my light will be destroyed” because the my is not mine.
on his doorstep. The troops didn't talk much in that battle. Raymond owned
Nothing can be said to stop it. Beads of sweat glisten on new panes.