Goat Hour Gospel (Such Salvage)

source

By Mark Wagenaar

Just as the evening’s about to move on, they appear, not as the apparitional deer—here, & gone in the next moment, without a sound—but one by one,
bumbling through briar, chewing through poison ivy, sniffing at trees.A slow procession walking beneath elms & birches that hold up the last light.
And you’re alone with the traces of things, the news in front of you:the crooked skeleton of Richard III was dug up from a parking lot,
humpbacked, once buried in his boots & battlefield wounds. Nearby a lost riverhas been uncovered, & coughed up its mouthful of Roman skulls.
No relic is safe, it seems, from an invisible tide that presses them upward.Sometimes it’s not the loss that hurts but the indignities of the discovery.
And yet beside the diggers & builders of new things is this mangy congregation,pushing through the scrub without a trail or blueprint or direction.
Their dirty white fur shines a little in this late, lost hour.They bleat as they shamble & piss on each other without warning,
or maybe as a warning, or in greeting. They’ll eat anything—tin can,T-shirt, canvas sack, bones of animals & kings, & carry them awhile.
And so do we: each night, across the country, people turn up at hospitalsunable to speak, for the needle or nail lodged
in their throats. They’re unable to explain why, but we know—that desperate mix of need & panic that can drive us to keep something safe
for good. These dearest items take your words & leave them luminous,radiolucent, shining on the X-ray, like this swallowed ring: a ghostly eclipse.
Small comfort to share an appetite with these goats, this dishevelled lot.But a comfort, too, to know that some things will be saved from the soil,
rescued from time’s indignities, if only for a little while, & by these scruffyreliquaries, on the other side of the valley now, flickering slightly
as they near the vanishing point of the timberline. And we might callsuch salvage mercy. And it must be even for the undeserving,
for those of us who didn’t live right, or live best. Whatever that means.Mercy will find us, even when we fail to recognize it, when we least expect it.

Probability

Probability

By Lia Purpura
source

Most coincidents are not
miraculous, but way more
common than we think--
it's the shiver
of noticing being
central in a sequence
of events
that makes so much
seem wild and rare--
because what if it wasn't?
Astonishment's nothing
without your consent.

Wallace Stevens

THE POEMS OF OUR CLIMATE
Wallace Stevens

I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl, 
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air, 
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations - one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white, 
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

II
Say even that this complete simplicity
Stripped one of all one's torments, concealed
The evilly compounded, vital I
And made it fresh in a world of white,
A world of clear water, brilliant-edged,
Still one would want more, one would need more,
More than a world of white and snowy scents.

III
There would still remain the never-resting mind,
So that one would want to escape, come back
To what had been so long composed.
The imperfect is our paradise.
Note that, in this bitterness, delight,
Since the imperfect is so hot in us,
Lies in flawed words and stubborn sounds.

Missed Time

Missed Time

Ha Jin

 

My notebook has remained blank for months

thanks to the light you shower

around me. I have no use

for my pen, which lies

languorously without grief.

Nothing is better than to live

a storyless life that needs

no writing for meaning—

when I am gone, let others say

they lost a happy man,

though no one can tell how happy I was.

Cagnes-Sur-Mer 1950, by Jorie Graham

Cagnes-Sur-Mer 1950

I am the only one who ever lived who remembers
my mother's voice in the particular shadow
cast by the sky-filled Roman archway
which darkens the stones on the down-sloping street
up which she has now come again suddenly.
How the archway and the voice and the shadow
seize the small triangle of my soul
violently, as in a silent film where the accompaniment
becomes a mad body
for the spirit's skipping images--abandoned homeland--miracle from which
we come back out alive. So here from there again I
read it off the book of time,
my only time, as if in there is a fatal mistake of which
I cannot find the nature--or shape--or origin--I
pick up the infant and place it back again
to where I am a small reservoir of blood, twelve pounds of bone and
sinew and other matters--already condemned to this one soul--
which we are told weighs less than a feather, or as much
as four ounces when grown--as if I could travel, I back up
those arteries, up the precious liquid, across the field of methods, agonies,
astonishments--may I not squander the astonishments--
may I not mistakenly kill brother, sister--I
will sit once again so boldly at my beginning,
dark spot where one story does not yet become another,
and words, which have not yet come to me, will not yet try to tell
where each thing emerges, where it is heading,
and where the flow of tendency will shine
on its fast way downhill. And it will seem to me
that all this is legend,
one of those in which there is no way to look back
and yet you do, you pay for it, yes, but you do. . . .
It was a hilltop town in the south in summer.
It was before I knew about knowing.
My mind ran everywhere and was completely still at the center.
And that did not feel uncomfortable.
A bird sang, it added itself to the shadow
under the archway.
I think from this distance
that I was happy.
I think from this distance.
I sat. It was before I knew walking.
Only my soul walked everywhere without weight.
Where the road sloped downhill there was disappearance.
Which was exactly what I imagined should happen.
Appearance and disappearance.
In my only life.
When my mother's voice got closer it had a body.
It had arms and they were holding something
that must have been a basket. My mind now
can go round her, come in front, and wrap her
as her arms wrapped that basket.
And it must have been wicker
because I see in the light the many lucent browns, the white tips,
as she steps out of the shadow
in which nothing but her hands and the front of her act of carrying
are visible. And when her body arrives
it is with the many lemons entirely struck, entirely taken, by sunshine,
which the heavy basket is still now carrying,
and her bright fingernails woven into each other,
and her face with its gaze searching for me,
gaze which felt like one of the bright things she was carrying
in front of herself, a new belly.
All I was to invent in this life is there in the wicker basket among the lemons
up into the private air in which she is moving,
where she is still a whole woman, and a willing woman,
and I hear what must be prices and names called out
of flowers and fruit and meat and live animals in small cages,
all from below us, at the bottom of the village, from that part
which is so comfortable to me which is invisible,
and in which everything has to be sold by noon.
I think that was the moment of my being given my name,
where I first heard the voices carrying the prices
as her face broke and its smile appeared bending down towards me
saying there you are, there you are.

--Jorie Graham