Pale Colors in a Tall Field, and: The Same in Sun as It Felt in Shadow, and: So the Edge of the World

Pale Colors in a Tall Field

Remind me to show you where the horses finally got freedfor good—not for the freedom of it, or anything likebeauty, though their running was for sure a loveliness, I'mthinking more how there's a kind of violence to reenteringunexpectedly a space we never meant to leave but gottorn away from so long ago it's more than half-forgotten,not that some things aren't maybe best forgotten, at acertain point at least, I've reached that point in my own lifewhere there's so much I'd rather not remember, thatto be asked to do so can seem a cruelty, almost; bad enough,some days, that there's memory at all, though that's notexactly it, it's more what gets remembered, how wedon't get to choose. For example, if love used to meanrescue, now it's more gladiatorial, though in the endmore clean: who said that? Not the one whose face I'vedescribed somewhere as the sun at that moment when,as if half unwilling, still, to pull itself free from the night'sshadow-grove of losses, it first begins to appear. No.Not that one. And not the one whose specialty wasmaking a bad habit sound more excusable by calling itritual—since when do names excuse? Wish around for ithard enough, you can always find some deeper formof sadness where earlier—so at least you thought—meresorrow lay … I'd been arguing the difference betweenthe soul being cast out and the soul departing, so Istill believed in the soul, apparently. It was that long ago.

The Same in Sun as It Felt in Shadow

Crownless now, intransitive, neither at rest nornot at rest between to be shaken and to beless shaken, in his head he's the magnolia'sbranches, he's the cast of ravens scattered looseamong them. To envy a wilderness, as opposedto becoming one: he has learned the difference, howall the more powerful parts to a life—as to art,as well, when it's worth remembering—resisttranslation. Whence comes their power. Mytrade is mystery, this song I also call mystery,he says to himself, half-singing. As if joylessnesswere technically just a word, in whichjoy figures, or he ever believed as much. He haslearned the hard way. As if sensation couldstop being a ceaseless wheel once the wheelstopped turning. He has learned the hard way,the only way that counts here, and won't go back.

________

So dark the night had been, not until daybreak did they know for certain where they'd made their camp was not so far from where, days earlier, they'd broken it, the same east-facing ruins of what had been a temple once, just above cloudline. If there was shame, each put a silence to it.

One started dancing—a slowish dance, to free his legs from their stiffness, hardly helped by the cold. Another tossed what little hay was left to the horses and packmules. Here's some water, said the third one, offering it as tenderly as he'd spoken of it, so as not to spill, For they'll need that too.

So the Edge of the World

Back then, we'd fall asleep to the wind at night.The wind was enough.        I think we thought sleep meant rescue,and because sleep came easily, always unannounced,we were safe. But if safe,        why the need for rescue?And since when does rescue amount variouslynow to the forgetting that sleep offers,        now to dream's not-so-predictable distraction,

I almost said aloud into the room's dark all around us,last night, though this morning these seem precisely        what rescue comes to, or can, and my mistake has been in thinkingof rescue as something more...