Koethe - Sallys Hair

I tried to find those passions in the sky, In moments when the heart surveys itself As if from above, and wonders at the Sight of something so particular and small. A day brings language and a hint of what it means, Of some presence waiting in the wings Beyond the stage, beyond the words that Gathered in the night and stayed And through whose grace I find, if not quite What I wanted, then everything else: The contentment of each mornings Exercise in freedom, freedom like a wall Enclosing my heart; the disjunctive thoughts Gesturing at some half-imagined whole; A continuity that on the surface feels like love. What is this thing that feels at once so nebulous And so complete, living from day to day Unmindful of itself, oblivious of the future And the past, hovering like a judgment Above the future, the present, and the past, Floating in the distance like the eyes of love? Call it experiencethat term of art For time in an inhuman world Indifferent to desire, the history Of one who one day wandered off from home Along a road that led from here to here: These sidewalks and these houses, city streets And suburbs and a highway flowing west Through fields and quiet streams, uncharted Trails descending to a farmhouse in a glen and Nothing in myheart or in the sky above my heart. And then from somewhere in that wilderness inside I hear the murmur of a low, transforming tone That fills the field of sight with feeling, And that makes of blind experience a kind of love. Let me stay there for a while, while evening Gathers in the sky and daylight lingers on the hills. Theres something in the air, something I cant quite see, Hiding behind this stock of images, this language Culled from all the poems Ive ever loved.

I dont believe a word they say, a word I say, But it isnt really a matter of belief: As ordinary things make up the world, So life is purchased with the common coin of feeling, Feelings deferred, that flower for a day And then retreat into the language. And later, When the hours theyd filled are summoned by a name, Its as if theyd never been, as if that tangible Release could never come to me again. I came here for the view, and what is there to see? The place is still a place in progress And the days have the feeling of fiction, of pages Blank with anticipation, biding their time, And ever approaching the chapter in the story Where it ends, and my heart is waiting.

That house was unbelievable: The fliers, when the stuff inside was sold, Described it as a decorators house The rooms like jewel boxes or the interior Of a Faberg egg, designed to conceal the facts Of being old, the boredom and the pain, The minor pleasures of anticipation or a lovely day, The chair in which he sat for hours following the light, Kept company by his catalogs and cat. After my mother died I wrote a poem About the presence of a vast, inhuman world Hidden behind our lives, as if a thing too close to see Might finally be made visible in death. Yet this time nothing seemed revealed: the Neighbors kept their counsel while the realtors came and went Beneath the flat blue sky Id known since childhood; The hospice overlooking Mission Valley Kept its secret from the warm December day; The new year promised a renewal of experience, An idea Ive never understood. I wonder if that thought has less to do With feeling than a sense of place, a sense that Comes to you the way ideas usually do Between breaths, or in the shower, Or on a walk around the neighborhood On a cool day in early spring. That cant be right: This sense is of an absence of a place, a freedom From constraint, the freedom of a part of me Inhabiting this poem, and a part I left at home. I like the image of a lime-green sky Above a house two thousand miles away, But distance doesnt matter, and the colorwell, It pleases me, thats all.

The lights were on, The keys were in the kitchen as I closed the door On what once had been my life, that it might start again As though each day were a departure And forgetting were the real renewal of experience, Making the commonplace seem strange And taking me to a place Id been So many times before, for the first time.