Love's Last Number. Christopher Howell
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the hours of supplication
and grace?
She is far from me now, a speck
rising and dipping on the dazzle,
on a glinting of green trumpets that call
and call as Mahler drifts past
in a clef-shaped canoe and I toss him
a story in which a man dreams himself
beyond thought, beyond the farthest
point of land, where what he loves
has left him widened and cloudy,
the great sky somehow come
into his broken-fingered notation
turning slowly all night, lifting
as I do, waving to her, imploring
the angels to open themselves,
tune their instruments and pretend
that he is one of them, or they
more of him than he can count.
CROSSING JORDAN
Having eaten the chickens, dogs, cattle, horses, our belts,
leather vests, and shoes, we came at last to the river,
great silver-blue spillage carving its monument and grave
in the endless grass.
We fell face down and drank, a writhing stillness
filling us like lust
or the sort of prayer they don’t
teach you.
Leaves revolved on the stream like golden boats, carelessly adrift,
open to the sky that seemed to be watching as we herded small fish
into the shallows and ate them alive
and squirming.
Later we made fire in the shadow of a cutbank
and slept and rose and ate and drank again and slept
and on the third day
we rose
as our Lord, to whom we had prayed all the way from St. Joe
and who had indeed delivered us
so that we thought the far shore surely must flow with milk
and something sweet.
So we made our crossing, the stream being wide but shallow.
Only one nine-year-old boy broke the human chain and so
was swept away.
Brother Jacoby said it was what God and the river required
by way of sacrifice, and the boy’s father went for him with a knife.
Thus discord came upon us and a taint
upon the new land
so that some of us longed for our lives as they had been
before we dared to cross the glinting vein, before
we dared the Lord to give us
everything.
But, finally, with the river at our backs it seemed wrong
to think of this.
Praise the Lord and his angels, we said, when we buried the torn
and bloated boy,
who had reached down with both hands for something bright
in the water.
BUT BEFORE THAT
we lay awake all night, dreams thickening
like hair in the cold branches
and ready to descend, ready to know
what had become and what would be.
She said, “I thought just now an owl
flew out of me, an emerald being, a species
of moon.”
And I said, “Sometimes.”
It was so cold we grew afraid of a warmth
that moved in the woods nearby, beginning
to curl toward us like a smile.
So we prayed and the sun came up with not
a single barnyard crowing, not one worried dog.
We ate snow and kissed and thought of dancing.
We knew where we were and that we were
what others would call an escape ecstatic
with grief because we were so few,
because our shadows wore so many
unforgettable strangers.
So there would be warmth and food, and still days
by the river. There would be each other again
and again in the light of a naked
and forgiving room. There would be nameless
secrets that would need nothing but to ask
“Does anyone really survive?”
and keep on asking.
CONNECTIVITY
A huge ball of twine turns to bread
and feeds the five thousand, Jesus unrolling it
and watching the sky for signs.
In the church on the hill someone has lost
the thread
of her devotion while underground
the minotaur sings sadly of a boy
strung out, lost in the maze
of shopping carts and limited offers
and girls undressed, the gold filigree
of youth lying
all about them, worshippers
filing past whatever follows something thin
and pale, amazed, loaves and fishes
and twine if you have it.
Let those who hunger stretch forth
their hands, all right?
Let something come to show
whose world [is this?]
and which thread is more miraculous
than dust.
Bright red. Blue. Something heavy
near your heart as Christ stands
on the hillside of empty baskets, fish-bone trash
and crusts of rye, immense cat’s cradle
above him in the sky.
DIMINISHING RETURNS
A crow sits in the dark, thinking
I’m an owl scouring this field for mice.
Then he thinks, I’m suddenly wise, too:
rem