Trace. Eric Pankey

perhaps

      The embarkation into the ongoingness that follows.

      The grid — at once minimal and complex —

      Holds curves and intersections,

      the plot

      And the plotted, point by point,

      Its line, its echoic spiraling.

      Call the bird

      The breath that blossoms and wilts.

      Displaced, the bird afflicts the space,

      Is the stigma by which the flawless is affirmed.

      Call the bird

      A sparrow

      Call the house

      The house we live in, The house of the Lord forever.

       The Place of Skulls

      One crow, perched on the gallows, oversees the folly.

      Still daylight — long shadows of a low sun —

      The visible hides the visible.

      Somewhere constellations turn like millstones.

      After the body’s hauled down, the tree resumes

      Its life as a tree: blossoming in season, bearing fruit.

       Prayer

      When you left it was as if a glacier retreated,

      As if the ice tonnage, which rasped, scraped, and scoured for ages,

      Diminished in a moon’s single phase to a trickle of meltwater.

      I live in its aftermath — till, eskers, erratics, cirques, exposed bedrock.

      Moss darkens the far side of a granite boulder. Pines.

      Then the valley fills with hardwood forest, which burns and grows again,

      Which burns and grows again, which burns and grows again.

       Edge of Things

      I wait at the twilit edge of things,

      A dry spell spilling over into drought,

      The slippages of shadow silting in,

      The interchange of dusk to duskier,

      The half-dark turning half-again as dark.

      There: night enough to call it a good night.

      I wait for the resurrection, but wake to morning:

      Mist lifting off the river.

      Ladders in the orchard trees although the picking’s done.

       The Calling of the Elect to Heaven

      Next to where nettles grow in the vacant lot,

      Drawers, left open and empty in a dresser,

      Warp, half-filled with rain. The low sky is ashen.

      Although workers climbed down years ago, a grid

      Of poles and planks still scaffolds the church steeple.

      No one pulls the rope slumped over its pulley.

      No one can recall the last hour sounded.

      My breath, as I lean close, darkens the window.

      Only nails on the walls where pictures once hung.

       Ritual

      Each year, a garland-crowned goat is driven into the wilderness.

      Repetition is an aid to memory.

      A garland-crowned goat, driven into the wilderness,

      Takes with it the burden of its sacrifice.

      Each year we drive out the garland-crowned goat.

      The goat makes a last meal of its crown.

       The Truth of Scripture

      Sunlight dapples on a horse’s flank.

      A virga

      Hangs in the vast western sky like Heaven’s gate.

      A virga hangs in the sky like an embrasure.

      Little by little the porch empties of light

      And one reads until each turned page is a blank.

      Night, parenthetical, is not the subject.

      One reads until each page is blank,

      keeps reading,

      As if the truth of scripture will be revealed.

      Night — an unstable, volatile amalgam —

      Gives way to day and words emerge from the page,

      As opaque as ever, riddling, random.

      One looks up and the horse is gone.

      What transport

      It offered, now absent.

      So one returns to the page, studies what’s there.

       The Creation of Adam

      A lizard circled the marble lip of the wellhead.

      In the wind, a shutter banged, disturbed the sparrow flock,

      Which lifted like a sail, only to settle again on cobbles.

      The other noon sounds? A horse turning a millstone.

      Rust inching up a drainpipe. The spilling of sand

      Down an anthill. The dog whimpering in a dream.

      Bees shuttled between the hive and the garden.

      On a cross of branches tied with baling wire,

      An old man hung a ragged wool overcoat.

      As he weeded, he instructed the scarecrow

      On the doctrine and conundrum of free will.

      When a crow landed on the scarecrow’s shoulder,

      The scarecrow, who had listened well, knew

      If he chose, he could shrug and shoo the crow.

      If he chose. And could shrug. And could move his lips.

       As of Yet

      Call it paradise, this enclosure of trees.

      No graves yet. No seasons. Time itself

      As of yet uncreated. Nothing as of yet

      Handmade. No stone knife. No bone needle.

      No spear point. Call it paradise

      Where a flint has yet to spark or deadfall

      Flare beneath lightning, flare, then

      Smother in a downpour, the char

      Slick black beneath a first rainbow.

      He has yet to learn to slaughter or tame the wolf,

      To don the wolf-mask. As of yet, her body

      Has not opened into birth, pain, and burden.

      Beyond the enclosure of trees, a scattering

      Of rocks they must still name and knap into tools:

      Chert, agate,