Tritone Life

How many times the heroic have gone down this road
by the same swamp of flat-tufted green and spiking palm,
under the same grave yard sky where thunderheads cast their menace,
to the same rockets, those beasts of a single rage, rockets.

Hear their eruption and feel you tremble.
How to ride on thundering fear to severe stillness?
There is no mistaking the child’s will in this,
for why have we gone if not wonder?

How many times the heroic have died in the blue beyond,
held up and suffocated in their perch,
pushed up and obliterated in the form of Y.
Victorious pontificate peace on the efforts of the dead,
but is not the hand of God a terrible mischief?

See its motion and feel you humble
like the minds of ancients who first heard them babble.
There’s no mistaking the child’s fear in this,
for why have we gone if not pride?

How many times the heroic have dreamed off this road
where once there was no road at all,
where a man’s leather boot first broached a world
of flat and vulnerable, moist and alien horizon.
He saw no familiar of sharp mountains and dusty plains,
felt no weight of throne and icon comfort.
He spoke to a world whose voice he could not hear,
this slave of the stretched finger rule,
and called it for a possession.

Hear the words and feel you disdain
the proclamations of our former greatness.
There’s no mistaking the fall of the child.
He rises above his father with a steel body and a furnace mind,
sparks from which the stars themselves shine no equal.

It’s easy to see sometimes why they hate us,
looking up from the pit to where our mouths
consume without tasting and our eyes
receive without knowing. We build the world
on the floor of our amusement. We watch
tiny players from too great a distance
to see them move. And the props of their lives
far too removed to arouse concern. Shacks perch
on a parched earth hillside where bruised girl
clings the tough guy who’s a boy. Laced tight canopy
covers bone-skin child more tightly than his shirt,
standing in the mouth of a hut. Drawn old city mother
hocks her daughter, toothless come-on, breasts plunging red-shirt. Cathedral relentless
squanders heaven’s citizens inside a wall of some 800 years.
There live the motionless. There live the numbered.
There they soak up storms and feel
the great cloud of the protected.

Have pity on us, so hard to pity.
Arrogance is not the excess but the defense
of a stomach that expands and is never full.
We try and we try, but no hardship we create
makes the having worthwhile.
Children of divine warning
we are sky high as good as on ground.
Ears hear their satisfaction from emotion’s stick.
Eyes see their possession in the screen thought placed it.
Where ever a man goes there he finds with him
the device of his anesthetism
so no comfort is too evasive, no squalor too great
to draw water from the well of empathy.
And the landscape orbits beneath us.

We are not a country called so by contours of earth.
Day by day and night by night she tells of what she knows,
of lights and signs, of chaos waters and those alien to air,
of valleys fragile enough to break
and mountains strong enough to shake.
This before stars were gas,
continents shifts of pressure and the land a prop for slogans,
when no built psyche her space of three dimension evils could hazard,
when gates opened only imagination could walk through
and longings ached only the prophet could speak to.
Do we feel?
The desert is empty, the prophet is gone.
He long since has spoken what long since has come.
Yet even here it vibrates the ground from where it first shook.

So do not be anxious over what we have,
wealth transcends nothing.
No one’s heart can make him a fortress of paper
or a guard of digits.
We are all the black and the frightened
chased down by the huntsman for curse or for blessing.
And yes, the numbered lie here as well.
Even in the palace of our distraction
where castle dreams sparkle so unnaturally grey
and fear is figures of paper mache
and Jamaica and Aruba are but walking distance
by a pink brick path that follows along
the white sand, the thick grass, the man-made lake.
Even here there are clouds above us. They gather and hang
and the suspended air begins to break.
A man and his son hold hands when they realize
they are walking nowhere in the rain.

V.

You have said the righteous is like a tree
planted in a garden by a river.
The world passes by and they wonder:
Who are these that stand like guards of no gold?

They are silent. Then they speak but not words
understandable to natural ears.
They are still. Then they move as if by force.
They are deaf, but silence is like hearing.

The world mocks, the world laughs: the world.
But Your river runs from spring to ocean
and in the slow and deep You are there.

The roots of Your trees emerge from the bank
to take more urgently what nurtures them,
and they lean out over the river, that to revere.

IV

There, a shaft of light falls on a gnarled branch
cut down some time ago and left alone.
And, there, the river’s shallows gurgle round
a limb like a claw lifeless on the bed.

A tree stands pained from the loss of its hand
like a man on a corner in a world
of concrete and steel, bewildered by cars
that pass and people who speak without talking

because the things he called his life are gone
and unreachable. Though he grit his teeth
and strain to get them back, still they are gone.

And in the garden the snake rattle curses
for the Gardener comes to shape those He loves.
But the snake will not find one leaf fallen.

They speak, these of the congregation,
as the wind moves unseen when it comes,
only heard as each one is touched by it,
and looked for when it leaves the garden silent.

Then it stirs the maple, leaves like a wave
under its touch rustle down words to stillness.
The wind gone again, then appears below
where, distant, the anxious elm flutters.

The bird stares down from limbs not her own.
The rattle snake coils up and waits
among the pruned branches and starving weeds

and parched soil sifts in from out like sand
until the wind, gathered up, drives these gone
and the trees groan among themselves and sing.

You have taken them from across the world.
Uprooted from their native soil,
planted in this foreign sanctuary,
strangers by instinct, they grow together.

The Banksia Rose creeps her sinewed vines
‘round the rough branches of the ancient oak;
the gray smoothed trunk of the Honey Locust
patient behind the swaying Jerusalem Thorn.

Such coexistence not found in nature
You make a habitat in Your garden
that enforests, for on it no bounds are set.

Where once there was barren land, the elm gently
‘clines across the bamboo straight of the ground
that resonates to the footsteps of God.

I.

You have said the righteous is like a tree
planted in a garden by a river.
Your river runs its course from spring to ocean
carving its slow and deep mark in the earth;

rushing its way through the wild lands,
stone gorges and meadows painfully green;
looping back and forth the valley like a string
in frozen fall to the mouth of the sea.

Where the river is most deep and slow
channels divert to water Your trees
and surround them as far as they might grow.

They grow tall from Your care and their roots
entangle for theirs is not to journey.
But the world passes by scoffing under their shade

We were desperate to get out of the apartment,
even that late in the day.
Storms roved east,
disillusioned gold miners headed back into the desert,
and we rode under as far as the mountains
until the pines were thick
and the rain fell faucets
between gapping lace work of needles.

Gray light deepened.
Darkness crept down the ridges,
grew in soft spaces amid the trees
and covered the swollen creek its mad rushing-
and the pool.
The mist of the water fall
raised its slow, cold heart to the rain.

We walked the paths along the creek
and rain ran down our hooded coats.
Cold undeniable forced us in.
Squares of light opened out into the night
and the fire touched our faces and our clothes-
those that we finally shed to the floor
to feel the waver of heat set free on skin.
Did we finally know
what we had been waiting to know all our lives?
And now? When I shiver?