Buckley - Star journal: selected poems

Our jackets grew heavy with birds and for a while we sat in the shade thinking we were someone, talking a bit of girls who would go, who wouldnt, how love would probably always be beyond our reach... We even talked of the nuns who terrified us with God and damnation. We both recalled that first prize in art, the one pinned to the cork board in front of class, was a sweet blond girls drawing of the fires and coals, the tortured souls of Purgatory. Harry said he feared eternity until he was 17, and, if he ever had kids, the last place they would go would be a parochial school. On our way to the car, having forgotten which way the safety was off or on, I accidentally discharged my borrowed 12 gauge, twice actuallyone would have been Harrys head if he were behind me, the other my foot, inches to the right. We were almost back when something moved in the raw, dry grass, and without thinking, and on the first twitch of two tall ears, we together blew the ever-loving-Jesus out of a jack rabbit until we couldnt tell fur from dust from blood....

Harry has a family, two children as lovely as any will ever be he hasnt hunted in years... and that once was enough for me. Anymore, a good day offers a moments praise for the lizards daring the road I run along, or it offers a dusk in which yellow meadowlarks scrounge fields in the grey autumn light . Harry and I are friends now almost 30 years, and the last time we had dinner, I thought about that rabbit, not the doves which we swore we would cook and eat, but that rabbit why the hell had we killed it so cold-heartedly? And I saw that it was simply because we had the guns, because we could.

Dust Light, Leaves

Above autumns burgundy and rust, beyond the orange groves chafing and ruddy in the frost, a cloud lifts into blue... the west goes up all hay-dust, flame, and the flat land glimmers out to it on the day-stream it is Millets sky of The Angelus, that nineteenth-century sky we have only in paintings and in these few still moments in their rose and amber rags.

As a child, I remember this... standing on the creek stones, dusk moving over the fields like a ships hull pulling away with that first sense of loss and release; I saw it was all about the beginning of dust rising into the long skys seam, into my own two eyes and hands. A chalk-white moon overhead and to the right, umber waves of sparrows back and through the empty trees.... Soon, stars will draw analogies in the dark, but now the world is simple as the dead leaves glowing in this late hour, simple as our desire to rise lucent as clouds in their camisoles of dust, the cool air burning through us over leaves drifting on a pond, over the last memory of ourselves looking up, stunned as carp blinking at the light.

Halleys Comet from the West Coast, March, 22, 1986

for Victor Kogler From the promontory we could hear the dark arrhythmic break of waves drum the silence of the early airthen the oil platforms like an armada, lit and busy in the bay. We expected every light, all life to be down, but even this sleepy town did not completely sleep.

Nevertheless, we held out our arms and measured our blind palms against a gone horizon linetwo up and five to the right and there fished about with the naked eye, halfway down from Mars, for that motionless, white swish of dust... Nothing. We stood there momentarily stunned by the light-tide of the Milky Waythat still spin and irrepressible smudge of its flung grains and tried then to pinpoint the stars shifting coolly to hang there with the thread and bones of all our myths. We went to binoculars, seining below that lake of light and caught it there streaming away in its own bright floss, sinking in the slowed motion of space like an Independence Day sparkler in a smoky nights display, deep and south of wherever it is we are. My friend recalled the only time he saw such a wonder was 1956, his mother rallying the family at 3 a.m.

Evening in Santorini

Above here, there must be a swath of souls wide and invisibly blue as this water, and at evening I think they must drift through the soft pinks and ambers of light, still dreaming, and confuse their lives with this one, as if some ash were still swimming in the violet arc and afterglow for again, after dinner and the delicate, straw colored wine, twilight thickens, falls and filters out as auburn as the skin of deer and fisherboys Minoans left in frescoes on the walls.

Evening in Santorini

Above here, there must be a swath of souls wide and invisibly blue as this water, and at evening I think they must drift through the soft pinks and ambers of light, still dreaming, and confuse their lives with this one, as if some ash were still swimming in the violet arc and afterglow for again, after dinner and the delicate, straw colored wine, twilight thickens, falls and filters out as auburn as the skin of deer and fisherboys Minoans left in frescoes on the walls.

Then, the dim taverna sparks with something like clarinets and mandolins, an old melody resonant and tenuous as joy; then the few birds make no excuse for abandoning the trees, and the young in one anothers arms take slight notice of this rich failing of the light, or the old turning home in it from the stony fields, hunkered from cutting the clear grapes grown low and away from wind. And once more I dreamed my body floating hawk-like in its ease above the agate shores, banking on thin air as the horizon roiled in flame at the oceans far end. But when you gaze up the sheer and volcanic cliffs to villages ridged on the craters lip they seem no more than snow at an unknown height, and a switchback toward them from the harbor spirals like Dantes 50 rings, a whirlwind of dust smoking upward from the quarried sand and so these are the candle ends of the lost Atlantis and the first world, a legion of dead vaguely shining beyond any dead we know, these winding walls and cave-like homes brushed with clouds and keeping their secrets as they ascend hand over hand up the air. Yet, if you climb the one plateau youll see them, white as sea foam, wash away into a curve of blue which rises to the bluer sky for stars that spill out and glimmer back and forth between the surface here and whatever surface there.

Star Journal