Tag: stubborn odes

“The New Hymns”, Timothy Donnelly

el-ec-tric:

They all begin by commanding you to praise
things like sea-thistle, pinecones, a crate of tangerines
stacked into a ziggurat like one you envision

ticking under overgrowth, ancient and counting
down deep in the tropics until at last a certain
heavenly alignment triggers doomsday, what then?

To think nothing might feel good for a time, the way
walking can, just moving around, turning
right whenever you happen to, heading along

toward nowhere in particular, getting there almost
without really trying or memory of where
you started out from, much less how you’ll ever get back.

I don’t want to have to. I don’t want to have to
locate divinity in a loaf of bread, in a sparkler,
or in the rainlike sound the wind makes through

mulberry trees, not tonight. Listen to them carry on
about gentleness when it’s inconceivable
that any kind or amount of it will ever be able to

balance the scales. I have been held down
by the throat and terrified, numb enough to know.
The temperature at which no bird can thrive —

a lifelong feeling that I feel now, remembering
down the highway half-hypnotized in the
backseat feeling what I feel now, and moderate

happiness has nothing to do with it: I want to press
my face against the cold black window until
there is a deity whose only purpose is to stop this.

A City’s Death by Fire

After that hot gospeller has levelled all but the churched sky,
I wrote the tale by tallow of a city’s death by fire;
Under a candle’s eye, that smoked in tears, I
Wanted to tell, in more than wax, of faiths that were snapped like wire.
All day I walked abroad among the rubbled tales,
Shocked at each wall that stood on the street like a liar;
Loud was the bird-rocked sky, and all the clouds were bales
Torn open by looting, and white, in spite of the fire.
By the smoking sea, where Christ walked, I asked, why
Should a man wax tears, when his wooden world fails?
In town, leaves were paper, but the hills were a flock of faiths;
To a boy who walked all day, each leaf was a green breath
Rebuilding a love I thought was dead as nails,
Blessing the death and the baptism by fire.

–Gary Synder

Because you love
the usual, rain, tired sky, you cannot pray
not even if it helps explain your sudden wish
to be the old man watching all this from his porch,
not asked for any pretense of work or joy to take
what sight still gives of color, and in slack
light to lift no hand to change a thing within
this perfect world of promised dark ?
just to see, and in plain seeing judge, as well
as any god could ask, all things good
which do not chorus for attention.

–Art Homer excerpt of “Duplex on Main” from What We Did After Rain