My Barefoot Rank. David Craig

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ accompanying voice is quiet,

      like the trees.

      What Jesus offers is out of time.

      If we were saints, none of this would be new.

      It would all be kindling: yesterday.

      Today would be a canvas—even

      the alphabet. You might go anywhere,

      take a left and never be heard from again.

      Not that the people in that place

      would care. There, trellised flowers

      find the ground, fresh green.

      The world is a sandbox.

      Everyone puts out a folding chair

      just to watch the sun set. A paintbrush

      could make the rounds for years

      without ever finding a table.

      The world is a large eye—

      its blinking moves you to the margins.

      This is where you’ve always lived.

      A young woman could live there, too.

      Silence is old, it’s Scandinavian

      snow, the heat of an outdoor sauna—

      cigar sweat, good liquor. The nearby rocks

      collude; though those farther off

      choose to remember when they were space dust,

      something fitter than this. But they know, too,

      that the earth is good in its way, food aplenty

      for the travelling-abouts. The leggeds

      don’t know where they are going,

      but that is their charm.

      Clouds are much the same, older.

      They sniff the ground like the beasts, tribes.

      But rocks! Now they know how to wait!

      They settle in the valleys for the long siege,

      perch upon ridges, look-outs; they will wait until

      only they matter again—things as they should be:

      time, that brigand, a passing, futile thing.

      Men are like beetles, busying themselves,

      fussing, losing all their heat, energy on things

      that do not matter, cities that rise like comic hats.

      They would do better to bide, to learn

      the slow value of the simple phrase, a step

      on the mountain. If they could fathom that,

      their lives would be changed; they would live

      with God, whose voice gives rise

      to mottled sunsets, to rifts in oceans, waves.

      Those shakings are food for rill and mountain.

      They fashion the cold’s flakes here—

      the whole universe, a vowel half uttered.

      The notes on my wife’s piano pages

      are tiny door stops, mice prints

      down a dark hall. I do not live in that house;

      no one ever has. Beethoven sits on a plush,

      dusty chair, lampshade over his illumined head—

      the only bulb under a high ceiling,

      distressed molding.

      A wolf moon shines on a staircase,

      but you cannot live there either.

      This is what you must keep: the truth of how little

      you are, or, better, of how little there is of you.

      (Who would miss that when the time comes?)

      And all the measureable world?

      Something for science.

      Your children, as well: how vain to expect

      some stepping off point, where they will find fertile

      earth, a perfect mate, though in their noons

      it will seem so.

      We work in the presence of a God we cannot see—

      a night. You can lift your little sailboat,

      sail it against a window, the snow outside.

      Whatever you can add, I don’t want it.

      There’s nothing else here—too much to take away.

      Jesuit high get-together

      They’d always seemed to glide

      through the good: one an Arch-Bishop!

      How have you done this, I want to ask:

      prodigals who knew better—never bothering

      with what was beyond them?

      They’d seemed like shiny Pennies from Sky King,

      listened to a different channel.

      Do their children walk on greener turf, I wonder?

      Do their wives, Donna Reeds, still smile bashfully

      when they get home in the evenings?

      And what would it be like to rouse myself

      under that sun, to eat every vegetable on my plate?

      Bad life choices are what separate us—

      though there is more. My father

      walks in me; my СКАЧАТЬ