Cosmos: A Poem

Time in the First Village

56 TIME IN THE FIRST VILLAGE With the last hymn ended, I believe the shade of a cedar across from our house already lengthens—screening us with green-black needles. I feel us among townsfolk not yet home from the service, for the sermon has run long. Before I can wake into the present, I am with my father and mother and brother Henry in one lit block between church and our porch. As much as we try to hasten, light thickens. My father with his widow’s peak—hair slicked back from his forehead emphasizing the spectacles— slows in shadow of the last oak and stops. Henry in short pants and hair blonde white, as in the light of a sepia photograph or of a newspaper clipping folded in a trunk, pauses halfway out and is caught. Mother stands behind, with her white arms crossed over her bosom in the nice cotton frock looking out. Her pout mouth that first withheld its smile now slowly eases. I am not among them. Perhaps she recognizes me in this future I alone live into, for our family. They feel no sorrow for me or themselves or each other, turning with the town in its time toward evening, the starlight almost beginning. They wave farewell to me, the eldest son: still young, my blonde wife now beside me. They see us as a couple assemble our children. A daughter is born, with her tiny infant nails, the first-fine lashes, part of the others’ world. 57 But in this lineal march, we as a separate family pass on into circles of seeing, perspectives of later-born souls, which those behind us no longer share. Yet in another time-order, those sunlit Sundays, and storms breathing in their rain through the front porch screens, and Christmas with a basket of oranges, still exist. Each yellow-orange sphere of this mountain of the world, piled under the sky-curved handle, remains, a part of the life I knew and was to know: the days to come intuited, each in its sphere of sun, as one premonition. As I write this, I come to myself, alone, as the intense recollection fades, in only the present. I see the living and those dead, whom I knew and so loved, as they recede into the community, where we first walked from sunlight to shade, then into light. For a moment I am with my parents and brother one Sunday, passing through shadow of the willow oaks and into a permanent sun, on and on, along the block of sidewalk between the Methodist church and our home. Unseen, I pass with my family into the house, where they live and breathe and could not believe themselves present only in words, safer in history. The front porch waits, the swing and chairs, where we may sit to contemplate the evening sky while it darkens, seeing the curved-wing swallows, their hieroglyphic arcs expanding as circles, interconnecting, individuals lost into designs, as the sharp constellations proclaim a higher order. ...