Buckdancer’s Choice: Poems

Reincarnation

Reincarnation Still, passed through the spokes of an old wheel, on and around The hub's furry rust in the weeds and shadows of the riverbank, This one is feeling his life as a man move slowly away. Fallen from that estate, he has gone down on his knees And beyond, disappearing into the egg buried under the sand And wakened to the low world being born, consisting now Of the wheel on its side not turning, but leaning to rot away In the sun a few feet farther off than it is for any man. The roots bulge quietly under the earth beneath him; With his tongue he can hear them in their concerted effort To raise something, anything, out of the dark of the ground. He has come by gliding, by inserting the head between stems. Everything follows that as naturally as the creation Of the world, leaving behind arms and legs, leaving behind The intervals between tracks, leaving one long wavering step In sand and none in grass: he moves through, moving nothing, And the grass stands as never entered. It is in the new Life of resurrection that one can come in one's own time To a place like a rotting wheel, the white paint flaking from it, Rust slowly emerging, and coil halfway through it, stopped By a just administration of light and dark over the diamonds Of the body. Here, also naturally growing, is a flat leaf To rest the new head upon. The stem bends but knows the weight And does not touch the ground, holding the snub, patterned face Swaying with the roots of things. Inside the jaws, saliva Has turned ice cold, drawn from bird eggs and thunderstruck rodents, Dusty pine needles, blunt stones, horse dung, leaf mold, 29 But mainly, now, from waiting- all the time a symbol of evilNot for food, but for the first man to walk by the gentle river: Minute by minute the head becomes more poisonous and poised. Here in the wheel is the place to wait, with the eyes unclosable, Unanswerable, the tongue occasionally listening, this time No place in the body desiring to burn the tail away or to warn, But only to pass on, handless, what yet may be transferred In a sudden giving-withdrawing move, like a county judge striking a match. 30 ...