--from Otherwise Smooth

Rosmarie Waldrop

1

How daily my life. How tiny the impurities around which words might accrue. Worlds. Whorls. Pearls? Once I stood in a town where nothing was left unchanged but the clouds driven from the east. Now I learn from the sea. Always the same, always different, brackish body, uncertain. The unusual I hold at bay by taking pictures. To let it accrue to memory without having to experience it? Do we live this way, walking, as if we could, on thin air? But the sycamore stands in the yard all day and all night. And now, though still lifeless in appearance, quickens. Roots gripping farther down.

 

3

Are we never able to touch it? The immediate between the ticks of the watch, the lighthouse flashes, one nerve impulse and the next? Not even with our eyes? A cosmic storm slips between my fingers without the least pressure exerted on the skin. Stream. Thin. Clean. Wind. Only once it’s past I latch on. Old light, of dead galaxies. Only once we’ve said “I” with all that follows do we become aware of pure experience, mute like a newborn’s smile. But then it’s already over. We console ourselves with knowing the difference, which we call history.

 

9

Grave, tomb, menhir, dolmen, cromlech, cairn, pyramid, coffin, black-box. The earth our mother. Caught in a movement that doesn’t seem to take place. With fields enough no end to plain. And bursting with buds. Death gleans no electric charge. No meaning. Only a window slammed shut. I keep circling. One excessive, emphatic quote: no space not crushing, no rain not maddening, no state not a vastation. And yet. Already so many pear trees blossom. Unscroll patches of soft velvet. The hand touches and lingers.