Cosmos: A Poem

Driving from Columbia

66 DRIVING FROM COLUMBIA I A concrete-block warehouse on the red-clay sandy edge of town can occupy the mind—no other sight so real for miles, only pine barren land, room for an unnamed longing when the eye like a brushing hand moves over the broom sedge field collecting the down-bowed heads which uncurl like fern, when the given wind pressure ceases. Then sole stalks uplifting one by one return to sun, reborn. No other mirror reminds me like pure field with pine horizon, where I bent to aunts like saints, the rosiness of broom sedge all the touch I knew of flesh arching back to the rustles from heaven. Desire pools still in horizons, air held by rain-sheen in gullies; then the meager lonely country, a tinshine half-blinded by bushes, a mule’s shadow burned into its stall, sky bleak with light over hay of a different century. 67 The glazed faces of houses, woodcrossed panes behind the screens, with swings on chains, now flash back the dark car we are to them. Sunday school’s faint call upholds the steeples, a stick-figure, crucifix life. The soul, uninstructed, innocent as a waterfall, iceberg whole, transparent like broken glass shatters into needles of desire, impaling my inner eye on rays of the sun’s thorn crown. II Radiant and whole and unknowable, this interface with fields, that time spreads out, feels real and unreal, a material world: space for years to cross, as I trace the twists and turns with miles behind us. This present I disbelieve intersects a wild turkey’s crow-black sheen across the road, as my fate winds its skein again from home terrain. I find it still a glass half-silvered, like soul under soil, semi-transparent. My love 68 rides beside, as my hands guide us over swale and hollow and river, the houses already dreaming of lamps at evening. This roadthreaded land, hill-contorted, smoothed by streams, holds almost our whole life— as all the ways behind seem to wind again through time, as I see in the rear-view mirror— our story a one of many, we travelers of the century we came from. Presently, I feel us in our last facing of west turn sundown-golden in glare through the windshield. And though of houses left in the past, behind, some wink out their windows, others reflect the leveling sun and prong their shine into the unknown, blindly lighted, traveling with us. Our headlights carve the coming dark. ...