Figured Dark: Poems

Elegy for Light and Balance

Elegy for Light and Balance In his seascapes, [Winslow] Homer depended on narrative structures that would, just as they began to suggest a normal unfolding, deflect the viewer from obvious and easy interpretations. —Notes from a catalog Driving the winter road that falls through the blueberry field. Rows flicker as I pass, red letters igniting a page of snow, with my house, that gray paragraph on the left. The road is aswirl, snow so thick I might fall under its spell, and will––my inner ear’s infected. I step into the drive, let go the car door, the cinders blurred with ice. And then–– the howl of wind, a too-slick sole, my body saying, I am not cured. ■ ■ In the old cartoons, when a clown is struck with a mallet, the birds twitter around his head, rising and falling, the way the swallows rose that summer evening, you and I in the gathering dark. They were so close–– their wings arced, then beat into a vast open. We walked out into the field, the moon alive and everything luminous––your face, my hands––one dancer balancing another. That night, your body pulling mine, 60 the simple hunger––your small bird-like shudder, a swallow fluttering to leave the lip of her nest. ■ ■ To the unconscious mind, any leap is possible–– the drunk stumbling along a cliff, or the soul, harp in hand, lifting away from the fallen clown––the music sweet, so sweet we catch our breath and turn when the soul-clown strums and wavers, deciding whether to go on. ■ ■ The snow begins again–– what the painter would not paint until his last years in Maine–– snow swirling and a man along a cliff, the howl of wind through dead sea grasses, all his options in the air. The seasons whirl and turn on themselves, the planets slow but spin back, so many china plates set awhirl on wobbly sticks in a show I saw as a child, never falling until the juggler, glittering in his beaded tights, said, They must. I could hardly catch my breath for the motion and the shine of it. Last week, ear howling, reeling as I haven’t reeled in ten sober years, I circled the shed I meant for a studio, my books inside and tables I might work at. The glass caught fire in the day’s last light, 61 snow adrift against the door, wanting someone to open it. ■ ■ Coming to, my lungs chuff to open, waves pulling the empty suck, gasping and then gasping again. In my good ear, it could be crows, who dance in the field and do not trust the sea–– my lip numb and a taste of blood, the sea salt and metal, where my face struck the ice. What story could I have told, rising on one elbow, casually looking out into the red-lettered world, even as the world slowly turned to white? ■ ■ I kept the catalog you gave me from the museum in Boston. It says that in the dead of winter, Homer began A Summer Night: two girls dancing along a cliff, their hands so delicately assembled and bodies circling–– a song one can almost hear and the sea, breaking, out among the kelp and limpets. The moon isn’t shown, though its light is fully arrayed, and the bodies of those who watch––do they watch the dancers or the sea?––are silhouettes along the edge. The sky is deep indigo, but here and there, and then in great swatches, moonlight renders the waves a cerulean blue; it fairy-swirls across the page. And the dancers glow, back-lit, in perfect balance with the waves. 62 For months, he reworked the canvas, finally adding the floor they dance on. It is an odd detail. Does he mean to keep the dancers safe, though moonlight lifts the waves and the bodies along the cliff lean back, vertiginous, forever falling toward the sea? 63 ...