The Alchemy of Happiness. Marilyn Bowering. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Marilyn Bowering
Издательство: Ingram
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Поэзия
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781770706231
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if the dolphins find the mountains

       delightful…

      I watched the dolphins swim,

      the blue sky, cloudless, like an unwritten song,

      and I felt the shadow of the years,

      heard a footfall

      like a stone

      dislodged

      by the wind.

      Was it you,

      and I was being remade

      even then?

       for Xan at fourteen

      You are all the light in the world

      gathered into a face,

      your eyes deep space and stars—

      who are you?

      When you sleep, your breath stirs

      the brooms of ages, dust shifts:

      your skin is gold,

      the past opens itself to your many dresses,

      the night unravels its blue wool:

      you stand on a far shore

      about to set sail—

      where are you going?

      When you laugh,

      the graves open, the dead put on makeup,

      the souls of children wake up:

      who will go in your company?

      You are a stir of wind,

      the scent of rare wood,

      your mind mirrors the breath of sages,

      your thoughts are new.

      I called you and you came.

      I loved you and you grew,

      but who knew

      this grace,

      the wound flower in the heart’s chain?

       Self-Examination

      You came into this world for one purpose,

      and that was to learn

      the story of all beings,

      but you let the account fade.

      You could have asked—they were willing to tell all—

      but every hour you neglected dreams

      and accumulated regret.

      For the whole of your life

      you said one thing:

      please show me the love in which I reside

      and one day,

      in the presence of death,

      you saw.

      Ah, me.

       Shadrach

      Sometimes the god

      is hanging up laundry

      next to a furnace.

      He nods, opens the furnace door,

      beckons, steps in.

      You know who he is,

      and his two friends—

      sometimes they wash themselves in flames,

      sometimes I am washed too,

      my skin crisp like gold foil,

      sometimes that’s all there is:

      just the walking,

      and the heart still human, exultant—

      for something has been understood

      about the flame inside, the flame out,

      about thought polished to a

      molecule-loosening dagger

      that permits all.

       Meshack

      Sometimes the god watches soap

      and water slosh behind glass at a laundromat:

      not even he can see who or what

      is being cleansed—

      he waits, like anyone would,

      for an outcome

      so he can start over

      if he has to, or find some other reason

      to link inner and outer,

      self and self.

       Abednego

      No gods are visible,

      but people buy groceries,

      open and shut car doors beneath

      unconscious rain from over the sea.

      They are well within the view from my father’s window

      where he sits in a chair

      to watch a tree yield, light bend, the horizon

      flex as darkness tidies itself

      into a sharp drumroll.

      I mail my letters,

      pray he has time to catch that last

      glint

      of a mast.

      Sooner or later I will try

      to name that ship.

       The Ship

      You can choose what form the flame takes

      just as I

      chose the stone of your white forehead

      on which to place my lips,

      and that stone, now, entombs me.

      I kept from you

      my adoration, my passion,

      and that you had my heart all along.

      A broken cup.

      So it is said, so I know

      no one enters Heaven

      without their father and mother,

      some mending,

      some rolling away of stones.

       North

      If the word for a ship means

      glacier, even iceberg,

      then there are limits to the world:

      seven seas slip between

      the known world

      and its warm shadows,

      opposites crack

      the planet.

      In the Earth’s core—

      the