Ras - One Hidden Stuff

Table of Contents

ALSO BY BARBARA RAS

RALPH WALDO EMERSON

Maybe today will be the day you wake and for the first time
watch the full moon set surprisingly red over the fine edge of the earth.
Maybe today youll see the fawn on its gawky legs, the spots on its side
floating tentatively like some leftover dazed grace,
so that you think about animals, their paths to righteousness,
and maybe youll remember the day a dragonfly rode your shirt front
all the way around the lake, its jeweled body breathless but pulsing,
a little like first love. Maybe today
youll find gardenias floating in a blue wood-fired bowl and their scent
will bloom into the room like ghostly elephants, bugling softly,
and finally, youll buy the tickets to Zanzibar,
somewhere with slow fans and ceremonious walking,
where the post office behind the soccer field will smell of cinnamon,
and on the way to the coast youll visit a village
and the king there will remind you without evil there is no good.
And though of course evil will enter into every day,
maybe today it will be impersonal, butting into your life quietly
like the deer heads on the walls of the barbecue shack, or insidious
but distant like the human ear in a lab somewhere growing on the back of a mouse.
Maybe you can put even these out of your mind along with the cruelty
of strangers and imagine that todays the day a little bit of time
might stop, suspended in the foot a great blue heron holds above the water,
or maybe youll watch the mourning doves and discover they warble
as they fly, so eternally amazed by flight that they call, Im doing it, Im doing it.
Why not make today the day you look
at the back of your eyelids in a fresh way, the glitter there
reminding you of the beach, the starstruck sand you sifted as a child,
sometimes finding a shell the size of a large speck and wondering
about the sound of the sea held in its infinitely small swirl
and what kind of ear it would take to hear it.
By now maybe it is noon, the sun squandering itself
like a coin burning a hole in the blue pocket of sky,
and you think of the hours in the dead of the day in a dusty square,
a colonial city somewhere in Boyac, and you remember
a burro in a plaza the size of a classroom, you waiting for the bus,
the burro waiting for nothing, while a dust devil picked up spinning, wind and dirt
dancing quietly, and you told yourself Remember this, the burro, the dust, and you
wrapped in a drenching solitude, and after all these years, you do.
Maybe today youll make another memory like that, maybe itll be the pelicans
and their orderly untalkative lineup in the sky with wings practicing
the language of knives. Maybe itll be the man shrimping,
a silhouette on the horizon at sunset, flinging his circular net up into the air to flash
a dainty daytime fireworks before it sinks into the sea.
Maybe it wont be today, maybe tomorrow, an even better day,
the brassy moon setting as you rise, maybe bouncing a bit before it slips
blissfully into the ocean, the Indian Ocean, of course, and overhead
the fabulous wingspan of new birds, hungry
for the blue horizon.

Spiders have surrounded the house with their fall fanfares,
each a lone assassin in its web, spitting out cocoons of eventual spiderlings.
Yesterday on the Loop cow number 6148 went by in a slatted trailer,
her ears standing straight up in the wind as if she were hearing
last instructions to the faithful for you know what.
In my next life I want to be the namer of paint colors
Loss the color of coffee, Awe the iridescence of goldfish,
Never the color of stars.

If thought travels at 155 possibly meaningless miles an hour,
how long will it take me to get from my mind to yours,
from red to green, from ontogeny to phylogeny,
all those recapitulations like bad roads over mountains where rivers
start to descend and you pick one and follow it
out into a dry valley until it evaporates, and when the water ends,
you stop as if at the end of a long pilgrimage.

It takes a nanosecond to get from here
to rage and a lifetime to get from cleanliness to godliness,
though who knows if youll recognize God
when you arrive: Pyrenees? Gurdjieff? Duckweed?
Maybe the matter is thinking doesnt matter, unless
you are objecting to war, praying for peace, while beautiful new syllables
keep rising up unbidden in your mind:

Jalalabad, Mazar-e-Sharif, Kandahar,
incantations you repeat until they scare you, like that improbable word
evildoer the President keeps using, as if hed just consulted
a thesaurus.

And back at the paint factory, Ill be naming Terror
the color of many people, all of us on our knees, begging for our lives.

A night sky with pain in it poured its dark
over the back door where we stood in the cold
losing each other and all I could think of
were things of no use, which was everything
the snow squalid at our feet, in the yard
the deserted garden and the deracinated clouds
obscuring the stars, even time mocking our stillness,
its hands sweeping away from each other reluctantly,
then crossing back, again and again, and us forfeiting
that perennial dillydallying, that contact.
What if I had said, Please, come back?
Who will bless the slaughterhouse? Who will mince the garlic
into a mass of perfect diamonds to toss into the salsa?
Who will call the flamingoes?
What if I had said, Stay?
Let me tell you about the photograph of a brain remembering
that looked like the white faces of monkeys we saw together on a coast.