When I Was Fire

I never mourned. I had to begin
and begin again, with hope,

before I could look back
at what I had done

and to whom. When I was fire
I felt my bull beneath me

in the chute. The sky was a wall
of stuck-shut windows.

I hadn’t thought in this century
it was possible to smell God—

but something in the soil
the very last time. It was there

when I let the bull bolt
from under, circle, and face me.

It was there where I bowed to him
burning.

- Sam Ross, from Company

"...he did not wait, as before,

for personal reasons, which he called people’s merits, in order to love them, but love overflowed his heart, and, loving people without reason, he discovered the unquestionable reasons for which it was worth loving them.”

- Leo Tolstoy, from “War and Peace,” about Pierre’s way of being in the world when falling in love with Natasha

Nikolai visits Marya in Voronezh

“During Nikolai’s brief visit, as usual in a house where there are children, he resorted to Prince Andrei’s little son when there was a moment of silence, stroking his head and asking if he wanted to be a hussar. He took the boy in his arms, began tossing him merrily, and turned to look at Princess Marya. Her tender, happy, and timid gaze followed the boy she loved in the arms of the man she loved.”

- Leo Tolstoy, from “War and Peace”

From Paul's letter to the Thessalonians

“But ye, brethren, be not weary in well doing.

And if any man obey not our word by this epistle, note that man, and have no company with him, that he may be ashamed.

Yet count him not as an enemy, but admonish him as a brother.

Now the Lord of peace himself give you peace always by all means. The Lord be with you all.

The salutation of Paul with mine own hand, which is the token in every epistle: so I write.”

- Thessalonians 3: 13 - 17

Prince Andrei at Borodino

“Prince Andrei opened his eyes and for a long time could not understand what was happening around him. He remembered the meadow, the wormwood, the field, the black, spinning ball, and his passionate fit of love for life. Two steps away from him, talking loudly and attracting general attention to himself, stood a tall, handsome, black-haired sergeant, leaning on a branch, his head bandaged. He had bullet wounds in his head and leg. Around him, listen eagerly to his talk, gathered a crowd of wounded and stretcher bearers.

‘We just pounded him out of there, he dropped everything, we caught the king himself!’ the soldier shouted, looking around him, his black, inflamed eyes glittering. ‘if only the reservers had come just then, brothers, he wouldn’t even have left his name behind, it’s the truth I’m telling you…’

Prince Andrei, like everyone else around the narrator, looked at him with shining eyes and experienced a comforting feeling. ‘But does it make any difference now?’ he thought. ‘And what will be there, and what has there been here?' Why was I so sorry to part with life? There was something in this life that I didn’t and still don’t understand…’”

- Leo Tolstoy, from “War and Peace”

Tar

The first morning of Three Mile Island; those first disquieting, uncertain, mystifying hours.
All morning a crew of workmen have been tearing the old decrepit roof off our building,
and all morning, trying to distract myself, I’ve been wandering out to watch them
as they hack away the leaden layers of asbestos paper and disassemble the disintegrating drains.
After half a night of listening to the news, wondering how to know a hundred miles downwind
if and when to make a run for it and where, then a coming bolt awake at seven
when the roofers we’ve been waiting for since winter sent their ladders shrieking up our wall,
we still know less than nothing: the utility company continues making little of the accident,
the slick federal spokesmen still have their evasions in some semblance of order.
Surely we suspect now we’re being lied to, but in the meantime, there are the roofers,
setting winch-frames, sledging rounds of tar apart, and there I am, on the curb across, gawking.

I never realized what brutal work it is, how matter-of-factly and harrowingly dangerous.
The ladders flex and quiver, things skid from the edge, the materials are bulky and recalcitrant.
When the rusty, antique nails are levered out, their heads pull off; the underroofing crumbles.
Even the battered little furnace, roaring along as patient as a donkey, chokes and clogs,
a dense, malignant smoke shoots up, and someone has to fiddle with a cock, then hammer it,
before the gush and stench will deintensify, the dark, Dantean broth wearily subside.
In its crucible, the stuff looks bland, like licorice, spill it through, on your boots or coveralls,
it sears, and everything is permeated with it, the furnace gunked with burst and half-burst bubbles,
the mean themselves so completely slashed and mucked they seem almost from another realm, like trolls.
When they take their break, they leave their brooms standing at attention in the asphalt pails,
work gloves clinging like Br’er Rabbit to the bitten shafts, and they slouch along the precipitous lip,
the enormous sky behind them, the heavy noontime air alive with shimmers and mirages.

Sometime in the afternoon I had to go inside: the advent of our vigil was upon us.
However much we didn’t want to, however little we would do about it, we’d understood:
we were going to perish of all this, if not now, then soon, if not soon, then someday.
Someday, some final generation, hysterically aswarm beneath an atmosphere as unrelenting as rock,
would rue us all, anathematize our earthly comforts, curse our surfeits and submissions.
I think I know, though I might rather not, why my roofers stay so clear to me and why the rest,
the terror of that time, the reflexive disbelief and distancing, all we should hold on to, dims so.
I remember the president in his absurd protective booties, looking absolutely unafraid, the fool.
I remember a woman on the front page glaring across the misty Susquehanna at those looming stacks.
But, more vividly, the men, silvered with glitter from the shingles, clinging like starlings beneath the eaves.
Even the leftover carats of tar in the gutter, so black they seemed to suck the light out of the air.
By night fall kids had come across them: every sidewalk on the block was scribbled with obscenities and hearts.

- C.K. Williams

"Prince Andrei, going back into the shed, lay down on the rug, but could not sleep.

He closed his eyes. One image succeeded another. He lingered long and joyfully over one of them. He vividly recalled one evening in Petersburg. Natasha was telling him with an animated, excited face how she had gone to pick mushrooms the previous summer and lost her way in a big forest. She incoherently described to him the dense forest and her feelings, and a talk with a beekeeper she met, and, interrupting herself every moment, said: ‘No, I can’t, I’m not telling it right; no, you don’t understand,’ even though Prince Andrei reassured her, saying that he did understand, and indeed he understood everything she wanted to say. Natasha was displeased with her own words; she sensed that she was not conveying the passionately poetic feeling which she had experienced that day and which she wanted to bring out. ‘He was so lovely, that old man, and it was so dark in the forest…and he had such a kind…No, I don’t know how to tell it,’ she said, flushed and excited. Prince Andrei now smiled the same joyful smile that he had smiled then, looking in her eyes. ‘I understood her,’ thought Prince Andrei.”

- Tolstoy, from “War and Peace”

From Paul's Letter to the Philippians

“Not that I speak in respect of want: for I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, therewith to be content.

I know both how to be abased, and I know how to abound: everywhere and in all things I am instructed both to be full and to be hungry, both to abound and to suffer need.”

- Philippians 4:11 - 12

As I Sit Staring...

As I sit staring out of my window
Wasting time which the traffic does not waste,
Nor any of the passers by in the street
Who keep time with time as they go
Measuring the seconds with their feet,
In their minds riding the crested tide
On white horses of pursuant days I think of you, James, at another window
With your stubby hands relaxed and your blue gaze
Invaded by a sense of emptiness,
Startled as if a gust of air,
Had blown through the interstices
Of your mind and hair,
Ruffling your forehead with a puzzled despair.
But I have learned lately that the spaces
And the timeless loneliness
Of the unfruitful waste spaces,
The desert, the untidy room, and the hour
Between waking and sleep,
Are windows opened onto power
Where we become most what we are,
When the conscious eye and ear
Are severed from what they see and hear
And in the hollow silent blackness deep,
Living tunes and images flower.

- Stephen Spender

"In the church there were always few people;

Natasha and Mrs. Belov would stand in their usual place before the icon of the Mother of God, built into the back of the left-hand choir, and a new feeling of humility would come over Natasha before the great, the unknowable, when at this unaccustomed hour of morning, looking at the blackened face of the Mother of God lit by candles and the light of the morning coming from the window, she listened to the words of the service, which she tried to follow and understand. When she understood them, her personal feeling, with its nuances, joined with her prayer; when she did not, the sweeter it was for her to think that the wish to understand everything was pride, that it was impossible to understand everything, that she only had to believe and give herself to God, who in those moments—she felt—was guiding her soul.”

- Leo Tolstoy, from “War and Peace”

When the Moon is Out in the Daytime

I was born at six in the morning so I’ve known more days

than nights. They’re piled up behind me like Corvettes

fit for the crusher; to embrace the absence

out of them, to make more room for the days to come.

Fact: if all the empty space between our electrons

and protons were squeezed out, you and I would fit

in this bucket.

You look injured, moon; a third empty, and two-thirds full

of bright white snake oil. Maybe that’s why you’re up

in the corner of the afternoon, too broken to rest.

Your nightshift starts in a few; rocking the oceans to and fro.

I’ve got plans for tonight: I’ll drive into its blankness

and just maybe it’ll be a classic. A night as perfect

as a racehorse or a fresh layer of frost.

When the day has finally talked itself out, we’ll co-create

a romance. Your bloodglow a searchlight; me revving

the engine. The radio’ll be playing and it’ll go like this:

- Tim Craven

A Map of Love

Your face more than others’ faces
Maps the half-remembered places
I have come to while I slept—
Continents a dream had kept
Secret from all waking folk
Till to your face I awoke,
And remembered then the shore,
And the dark interior.

- Donald Justice

Primer

And what if you have nothing?

I pick up a stick. Yes, that’s always first.

And next? I see what I can see around me.

Find the sun or moon. Find high ground.

Find north by where the moss grows.

Yes. Now close your eyes. Find them.

The sun’s behind. I can feel it

on my neck. High ground’s to my right.

North’s ahead. Yes. And the wind?

The wind’s west. It cools my left temple.

Yes. And next? If I can bug out

I bug out. Otherwise I go high

and dig a foxhole and tie something bright

above me. You forget something.

Right—first I cut my name in the dirt,

then I go high. Yes. And next?

I walk a loop with my bright thing in sight.

If I find a better stick I switch for it.

Yes. And if you need to cry?

I crawl inside my foxhole and cry.

And what do you tell yourself as you cry?

Someone’s coming. Yes. And what if

no one comes? Each hour I call

in all directions. I listen. Yes.

And what do you listen for?

Sounds that shouldn’t be there. Yes.

Sounds that should be there but aren’t.

Yes. And what have you heard

since we started? A bird. Yes. Another bird

far away. Yes. A gust in the trees.

Yes. Your voice, if your voice counts.

Yes, my voice counts.

- Anders Carlson-Wee

At the Grave of Elizabeth Bishop

I, detaching myself from the human I, Henri,
without thick eyeglasses or rubberized white skin,
stretched out like a sinewy cat in the brown grass
to see what I felt, wrapping my tail around me,
hiding my eyes.
                I slept. I waited. I sucked air,
instead of milk. I listened to pigeons murmuring.
Scratching my ear, I couldn't tell if I was male or female.
The bundled energy of my life drifted along
somewhere between pain and pleasure,
until a deerfly launched an attack
and anger, like a florist's scissors,
pinched the bright chrysanthemum of my brain.
Overhead, the long enfolding branches,
weighted down with Venetian green,
suffused the air with possibility.
I felt like a realist, recovering from style.
Grief and dignity swirled around discreetly,
transferring to me an aura of calm,
as I lay in a shawl of gold light,
licking my paws, licking my throat,
my smooth imperturbable face revealing nothing,
even when I thought about my first loves,
surface and symbol, rubbing against me,
humping in the shadows, making my whole body tremble.
I purred, watching an iridescent blue beetle
imbibe chlorophyll from a leaf.
I flared my nostrils, hearing a starling
splash in an amphora of rainwater.
With my paws in the air, exposing my ripe belly,
I rubbed my spine, a little drunk on the ultraviolet rays
and on myself, I confess.
Then the sky cleared. Birds were flying.
I felt a deep throbbing, as from a distant factory,
binding me to others, a faint battering of wings against glass
that was the heart in the lovely dark behind my breast,
as I was crouching to tie my shoelaces,
feeling strange in the meaty halves of my buttocks,
until I sprinkled a little earth on my head,
like Hadrian reunited with the place he loved.

- Henri Cole

From I Corinthians

“For the body is not one member, but many.

If the foot shall say, Because I am not the hand, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?

And if the ear shall say, Because I am not the eye, I am not of the body; is it therefore not of the body?

If the whole body were an eye, where were the hearing? If the whole were hearing, where were the smelling?

But now hath God set the members every one of them in the body, as it hath pleased him.

And if they were all one member, where were the body?

But now are they many members, yet but one body.

And the eye cannot say to the hand, I have no need of thee: nor again the head to the feet, I have no need of you.

Nay, much more those members of the body, which seem to be more feeble. are necessary:

And those members of the body, which we think to be less honourable, upon these we bestow more abundant honour; and our uncomely parts have more abundant comeliness.

For our comely parts have no need: but God hath tempered the body together, having given more abundant honor to the part which lacked.

That there should be no schism in the body; but that the members should have the same care one for another.

And whether one member suffer, all the members suffer with it; or one member be honoured, all the members rejoice with it.”

- I Corinthians 12:14 - 12:26