| John Koethe
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause
Elizabeth Bishop
A field of unreflecting things Time is passing by: inert, Anonymous beyond recall, the deflected Objects of a self-regarding gaze Untouched by the anxieties of proximity or love. I tried to find those passions in the sky, In moments when the heart surveys itself As if from above, and wonders at the Sight of something so particular and small. A day brings language and a hint of what it means, Of some presence waiting in the wings Beyond the stage, beyond the words that Gathered in the night and stayed And through whose grace I find, if not quite What I wanted, then everything else: The contentment of each morning's Exercise in freedom, freedom like a wall Enclosing my heart; the disjunctive thoughts Gesturing at some half-imagined whole; A continuity that on the surface feels like love.
What is this thing that feels at once so nebulous And so complete, living from day to day Unmindful of itself, oblivious of the future And the past, hovering like a judgment Above the future, the present, and the past, Floating in the distance like the eyes of love? Call it "experience"-- that term of art For time in an inhuman world Indifferent to desire, the history Of one who one day wandered off from home Along a road that led from here to here: These sidewalks and these houses, city streets Through fields and quiet streams, uncharted Trails descending to a farmhouse in a glen and Nothing in my heart or in the sky above my heart. And then from somewhere in that wilderness inside I hear the murmur of a low, transforming tone That fills the field of sight with feeling, And that makes of blind experience a kind of love.
Let me stay there for a while, while evening Gathers in the sky and daylight lingers on the hills. There's something in the air, something I can't quite see, Hiding behind this stock of images, this language Culled from all the poems I've ever loved. I don't believe a word they say, a word I say, But it isn't really a matter of belief: As ordinary things make up the world, So life is purchased with the common coin of feeling, Feelings deferred, that flower for a day And then retreat into the language. And later, When the hours they'd filled are summoned by name, It's as if they'd never been, as if that tangible Release could never come to me again. I came here for the view, and what is there to see? The place is still a place in progress And the days have the feeling of friction, of pages Blank with anticipation, biding their time, And ever approaching the chapter in the story Where it ends, and my heart is waiting.
Labels: john koethe, poetry |
