Jorie Graham

See how they hurry

to enter

their bodies,

these spirits.

Is it better, flesh,

that they

should hurry so?

From above

the green-winged angels

blare down

trumpets and light. But

they don’t care,

they hurry to congregate,

they hurry

into speech, until

it’s a marketplace,

it is humanity. But still

we wonder

in the chancel

of the dark cathedral,

is it better, back?

The artist

has tried to make it so: each tendon

they press

to re-enter

is perfect. But is it

perfection

they’re after,

pulling themselves up

through the soil

into the weightedness, the color,

into the eye

of the painter? Outside

it is 1500,

all round the cathedral

streets hurry to open

through the wild

silver grasses…

The men and women

on the cathedral wall

do not know how,

having come this far,

to stop their

hurrying. They amble off

in groups, in

couples. Soon

some are clothed, there is

distance, there is

perspective. Standing below them

in the church

in Orvieto, how can we

tell them

to be stern and brazen

and slow,

that there is no

entrance,

only entering. They keep on

arriving,

wanting names,

wanting

happiness. In his studio

Luca Signorelli

in the name of God

and Science

and the believable

broke into the body

studying arrival.

But the wall

of the flesh

opens endlessly,

its vanishing point so deep

and receding

we have yet to find it,

to have it

stop us. So he cut

deeper,

graduating slowly

from the symbolic

to the beautiful. How far

is true?

When one son

died violently,

he had the body brought to him

and laid it

on the drawing-table,

and stood

at a certain distance

awaiting the best

possible light, the best depth

of day,

then with beauty and care

and technique

and judgment, cut into

shadow, cut

into bone and sinew and every

pocket

in which the cold light

pooled.

It took him days,

that deep

caress, cutting,

unfastening,

until his mind

could climb into

the open flesh and

mend itself.

From EROSION (Princeton University Press, 1983)

Dawn – or is it sea-blue – fills the square.

Two in a room asleep with that window.

And dark thinning inside the view.

And human breathing.

And freedom in the room like a thin gray floating.

And doctrine.

And other kinds of shine rising off the edges of things –

as if the daylight were a doctor arriving,

each thing needing to be seen …

Soon the sunlight

will want to be changed.

Will want to be caught up in the weavings of freedom.

To be caught up in the wide net and made to have edges –

light coming in, so acidly, with the strength of wind or an ox …

Outside, slowly, the grapes seem fatter.

The cat moves its tail once in sleep.

The silence is largest wherever an eye alls.

Somebody’s glance smokes through the blues until they start to

feel …?

But it is all chalky.

All asleep, all unalive.

An icy thing, even in its fluency,

the tree, the stone heroically built up into a wall,

each stone in the mind of its mason, elsewhere, asleep,

the cat in the sleep of its owner, the purple light, muscular,

more days, more nights, more roads, shouts, flowers,

all making towards what pebbled shore,

each changing place with that which went before –

and forwards, forwards, how it all contends,

across the crookedness to be itself, to be at last, the crown,

the jeweled asterisk that stops that very moment still,

the place the parallels, the cruelties, do, for just a fraction

of a pebbled instant,

meet – (save that to die I leave my love alone) –

possibly rain oncoming – on the sidewalk down below

could it be steps, or is it just the clock? –

does it arrive and dissipate? –

no, it splatters like

thousands of thoughts,

replacing all the listening –

sea of ideas – so blue –

although you can hear something like cuts in the blue –

and one can feel how the boat feels –

all of the freedom swirling and slapping round the keel, the here,

foaming round, as feelings – and still the pitch of the dawn

grasping at transparence, as if something like an hour were

trying

to plash in, and make, and make …? what would it make? –

and in the suddenly awakening one:

an upwards glance, one take – a main-mast starting up –

sails glimpsing about, quick rules and suppositions – coalescings –

and then the single sturdier open gaze cast up: a stare: a fear:

why is father lashed to it?

why is mother singing?

From THE ERRANCY (Ecco Press, 1997)

I wanted you to listen to the bells,

holding the phone out the one small window

to where I thought

the ringing was –

Vespers scavenging the evening air,

headset fisted against the huge dissolving

of the out-

side – a vow being exchanged

where I stare at the tiny holes in the receiver’s transatlantic opening

to see evening-light and then churchbells

send their regrets, slithering, in –

in there a white flame charged with duplication –

I had you try to listen, bending down into the mouthpiece to whisper,

hard,

can you hear them (two petals fall and then the                    is wholly

changed) (yes) (and then another yes like a vertebrate enchaining)

yes yes yes yes

We were somebody. A boat stills on a harbor and for a while no one

appears,

not on deck, not on shore,

only a few birds glancing round,

then – before a single face appears – something

announces itself

like a piece of the whole blueness broken off and thrown down,

a roughness inserted,

yes,

the infinite variety of having once been,

of being, of coming to life, right there in the thin air, a debris re-

assembling – a blue transparent bit of paper flapping in also-blue air –

boundaries being squeezed out of the blue, out of the inside of the blue,

human eyes

held shut,

and then the whisking-open of the lash – the be thou, be thou –

– a boat stills in a harbor and for a while no one

appears – a sunny day, a crisp Aegean blue,

easy things – a keel, a sail –

why should you fear? –

me holding my arm out into the crisp December air –

beige cord and then the plastic parenthetical opening wherein I have you

– you without eyes or arms or body now – listen to

the long ocean between us

– the plastic cooling now – this tiny geometric swarm of

openings sending to you

no parts of me you’ve touched, no places where you’ve

gone –

Two petals fall – hear it? – moon, are you not coming soon? – two fall

From SWARM (Ecco Press, 2000)