Accounted For

Signs, Tokens

69 Signs, Tokens I. The empty hummingbird feeder swivels air, four petal holes gaping at monsoon’s edge— flash floods throaty in the canyons. The Romanticist walks out into it eating fish fry in a paper boat. He circulates the wet streets at night without prophesy or blame. His hair unraveling, a fine raven wrapped with sky, face, lifted to rain. II. Morning prayers open like a hive. Small jets maneuver above the desert washes while the retired notary, stuck with amnesia, worries out loud his youngest will die in the Viet Nam War. He paces the garden wall, mumbles to the slugs he’s drowning in beer. Oregano and basil leaves break from the sunlight spreading like ash or desiccated eggs. 70 III. July 4th, and a middle-aged couple has just walked out of a dark theater into the sky’s citrous bloom. She sees a unity of stillness, what the mythic Yellow Emperor called in the 3rd century, hsü, that tenuous light threaded between her Us and his, between Mountain and Lake. IV. Ivy clings to the house, sprinkles of noonday sun. A sand painting of a man staggers up the street—dust, and his chest on fire with armfuls of just-picked pomegranates, almost a gang of dead heads teetering, but with a shake, he says: “No. It is Poe’s love rising.” IV. A clerk at The Quick Stop drips cole slaw on the counter, apologizes after patting his lips and chin dry, adds “What can you do when there’s not enough time?” You smile and shrug, think not about Time, but Chance and Boethius conjuring up Lady Philosophy with her big, bright, flickering eyes, telling him who is all locked up 71 in a cell, just before his execution, how different causes come together, The Order proceeding from an inevitable bond, how it flows from the source which is willed, and how all of this inclines toward The Good. V. There are people who believe in cloud-souls, who pray and are transported to “The Purple Tenuity,” the Pole Star. Some think they’re crazy for saying they ride their “Trace-Horses,” having climbed the auroras to be in a clear city. Who would mind an afternoon free of the world? Who wouldn’t want a rest in any of the fields past “the Daunters and the Startlements at the gate of the mind? To lounge on the estrade of the heart?” To be, as they say, “thin as a feather with The Grand Antecedence in the brumal burgeoning of Cinnamon Trees?” 72 VI. The wind, amphoric, as across the mouth of a wine bottle, has been blowing all night. There’s always trouble in the world, and your friend who was once a picture of some reserve, confesses he would love it if it were true; that is, if Christ loved with his body, Mary Magdalene. Life would make sense . . . I think he meant his own, but anyone—who believes in the small resurrection and the night. ...