Poem In Which Krishna Appears As a Heron
Marjorie Stelmach
Lifting awkwardly, scattering beaded droplets to pocket
the lake's pearl surface,
a heron not thirty feet from my door. Wings. White.
My heart startled,
my flat palm pressed against air where the door swung away.
And the replay: my entry,
blear-eyed, into another chilled dawn; the draw of my breath
at the starched unfolding; [End Page 170]
the muted crumple of space when the heron walked
into air.
Once, driving fast in broad day, a deer - huge,
in space and time's
drawn bead. The swerve and burn of tires, and for
long minutes after,
the race of two hearts escaping one another. Does this sound
like love to you?
The young immortals on their jet skis slice each other's wakes
in tightening curves
and disappear, heading, may it be, for home docks, as lightning
scores the sky.
Here in my doorway, I pray the storm in. Wind
bellies the screens,
sieving the ozoned air. Krishna called memory smrti - not,
as I've always thought,
the linear tracings of one's own past, but the calling forth
of latent impressions
left by those rare events that transcend our personal lives.
Love, again?
Down across the lake sweeps a bodied wind. The lake-skin
tarnishes in streaks
of black, and the sky purls white - a second coming of the crazed
wake-cutting of the wild [End Page 171]
young men. Improbable, this duplication - but a heron has come
to feed at my shallows;
I know the translation of a god when I see one. Sleep,
Krishna tells me.
Sleep, and this will stay - in the rafters, in the sand - will come again,
with something of the hollow
of your grave in its return. Uniformly beaded now, my screen suggests
a Hindu universe
of pearls reflecting pearls, in one of which a heron stands,
feeding, ankle-deep
in me; a young doe, improbable, settles in the leaves.
May these
impress the darkness. May the lake's soft pocketing last
all night, as though
a curtain of herons were forever rising. May the blown sound
of thunder and the imprint
of birdcall recur. May my heart lift awkwardly - like love?
to bear their crossing,
my memory of them latent in their memory
of me.
Marjorie Stelmach is author of Night Drawings (Helicon Nine Ed, 1995). Her work appears in The Kenyon Review, New Letters, Chelsea, and elsewhere.
