Deming - Rope

Table of Contents

ALSO BY ALISON HAWTHORNE DEMING

POETRY

GENIUS LOCI
THE MONARCHS: A POEM SEQUENCE
SCIENCE AND OTHER POEMS
POETRY OF THE AMERICAN WEST (EDITOR)

NONFICTION

ANATOMY OF DESIRE: THE DAUGHTER/MOTHER SESSIONS (COAUTHOR)
WRITING THE SACRED INTO THE REAL
THE EDGES OF THE CIVILIZED WORLD: A JOURNEY IN NATURE AND CULTURE
TEMPORARY HOMELANDS
GIRLS IN THE JUNGLE
THE COLORS OF NATURE (COEDITOR)

ONE HAS ONLY TO SERVE
LIKE AN OLD ROPE

SAINT-JOHN PERSE, Praises

THE PROPITIOUS GARDEN OF THE PLANE IMAGE

AFTER THE PAINTINGS OF BRICE MARDEN

By the time the Santa Anas
travel from the ocean
to our inland desert
theyve lost their name.
The palo verdes and mesquites
know such winds that rake
through their pinnate leaves.
I live about as far from
the source of these storms
as I do from the muses,
their names lost too
since theyve descended
from Olympus to hijack
our moods and amplify
the cosmic background noise.
So everything that needs
to be said can be said
without the right words
with only the gusts,
so utterly themselves,
and the inner pattern that never falters.
The canvas is the path
the mountain hermit takes
leaving the city to purify his ears.
A path but no sign of footprints.
Many pathways that loop
and veer and sometimes touch
themselves or each other
for an interval
then split and turn away.
How does a line become a path?
The way in is to choose
a certain color and follow,
get lost and choose again
the lines and their light.

SALT

(MONASTERY HOTEL, PRAGUE)

Ducks wake me from an afternoon nap,
their squawks amplified by the cobbled walls
of the Devils Canal. I lean from the window
like a fishwife, watching them squabble
over a floating baguette slice
tossed from the garden above them,
an embassy reception where the brass band
lounges in baby blue faux military uniforms,
pulling beers from a keg, taking turns to piss
behind the lindens that shield the musicians
from the milling suaves, diplomacys
genteel bombast that feels more like a movie
than life from my perch across millrace,
river swill, brown-water carp stream.
The trumpet player shakes off
the last yellow drops and zips up,
the day, a god asking nothing
except that the duck must dive,
the band must play, and the city must still be our ark.

Room size of a shoe box
where someone paced
at night rejected by sleep,
where someone prayed
to holy Mother of God,
seeking benefits
not promised by contract
but harbored in mind,
and in each room another
who fell into prayer
on the schedule rung out with bells.
Someone hungry to leave
the news and take on the duty
of begging for alms, the poor
surrounded by suffering
as a bird by its nest. Now even
the news is a joke. Some days
you laugh at the anguish
because you cant stand
to see another holy relic blown to dust.

Skinhead parents in the park
play catch with three children and a pug,
punk head-dos on the tykes,
preschoolers sporting buzz cuts
lined with waxy spikes, racing pell-mell
and laughing with their little pig-dog
as a ten-inch simulacrum of the world
rolls out of reach and under the shrubs.
What language do those children speak,
wearing happy yellow overalls?
Sad things pour off the children
while they play and the wisdom of their bodies
tells them to run faster and search harder
down in the dirt until they fall exhausted,
lying backs-to-earth and listen
to the vague noise of trees releasing pollen.

Near dawn a scream
quick-hauls the guests
from sleep, kestrel
assailing its prey,
the shrill cry of its praise
like the light show
the cuttlefish makes
to stun its beloved
victim dumb. No vespers.
No come-cry. Only
the night to lull.

Hello again, chirped the stranger,
as I found my seat
for the leg to Prague
after wed worked and slept together
from Boston to Zurich
not saying a word
though Id craned to see
his PowerPoint equations,
the man with hair
long, wisped, and wild as forest lichen
that made me like him
plus, hed left me alone
to write and nap,
rarely breaching
the sacred space
of our shared armrest.
What are the odds
a seating algorithm
startled up a conversation.
Some casual diplomacy,
jokes about the end
of American empire
and the beauty thats
survived Czech history,
and then on to work
his to do with
salts in the human body,
trying to figure out
what all those ions
are doing in there.
He gave me numbers
and factsa smile
that said he knew
they were poems
(a man interrogated
forty-eight hours straight
for bringing Nico
and the Velvet Underground
to Prague) and this:
the ocean today is four times
more salty than it was
when the first unicellulars
invented themselves
and in the long version
of the story invented us,
our cells reconstituting
the formulareliquaries
of the ancient sea. We can
only live awash with
that mixtoo much
salt or not enough,
were deadwhile rain
keeps melting minerals
and rivers keep carrying them
and adding whatever else
we chuck into their flow
their job to carry silt (and, thank you,
Holder of the Reliquary Source),
solvents, toxins, sewage, and beads
of plastic that form a pink flamingo island
far at sea where some
new extremophile is
warming to the task of breaking
down the mess to write
the new equation for continuing.

The God of Abraham
made a religion of salt
because it could protect
things from spoiling
but first the people
had to gather it
from the Dead Sea,
building star-shaped
rafts of straw (so the
Internet Zealot of Salt
writes) to give the crystals
purchase on something solid,
as the ropes and nets
of fishermen will serve
when drying on shore.
Can everything sacred
be described by things
and their emergence?
Romans paid their soldiers
in salt (their salary)
so valued were its assets.
Salt and gunpowder the
planks of civilization
not gold and books.
A city of five hundred people
needed one ton per year
trains one-thousand-camels
long crossing the Sahara.
And now at the sad, mad
end of wealth ( ... let them have
dominion over the fish
of the sea)fish gone, I read
and hold up as tithe
to the church of science-made-art
the story of the man who
swam through salt,
emerged on land to crawl
his way upright, then sat
so still in a field at woods edge
that the wild deer came
and licked the salt from his skin.

SESTINA

March sunlight falls on the weavers house,
the glare too much for tourists
who rub their brows with Coke cans
while the merchant explains marigolds
for yellow, acacia seed for black, bugs
off a cactus, crushed to make a range

of colorspurple, rose, gold, and orange.
Wed come to get away from our houses,
two artists barely containing what bugs
us about domestic life, feeling like tourists