by Maureen Alsop
‡
To what I’ve adjusted, you listen. This is compassion. It is happily without need. I make no association. Yes, she fed the horses, but was it “I” in the story. Was it “you” in the story. I don’t remember. But I remember the pasture. I remember standing among them. And when I held out my hand they came to feed. They fed from the grain to feed me.
Somewhere the body unloads itself of time. But that’s just perception. The horses I groom, visible in the field to a passer-by, are said to be alive. They are said to be alive, but honestly, I couldn’t see them.
There is place in the self beyond sleep. Yes, there is a sleep in which there will be an hour, a ridgeline. You will walk upward into the bronzed rocks. There is a room there. And a horizon which you will not believe. Perhaps the room is a space for love. And what love’s room became in us: a trance under a passing wheel; the awkward sun, a sun possessed; a landscape’s wet spark; useless words you begin to forget or nevertheless remember as I track your brief descent.
I didn’t know you could be summoned, up from the lonely ground among the lumen and the earth and the longing shift: wind through pin-oaks .
The people of this place had been shoved into each margin. And our progress of lifting each injustice was like a sipping of air. Even your mare inhaled black particles, the fire settling the ridge. Her steady gaze, a protection, pushed winter’s boundaries out to the sea. Symbols gleaned and sank into the grain.
§
After the battle a forest of stunted birch blanched the mountain. No human element remained. I drew our self-portraits across the terrain. I swept my hand, as guest, over the perimeter. My thumb pressed into our eyes, moulding our vision into a still-life. The sky fingering iron traces of rain. I marked the scene.
—the first mark for the music, the second for the idea—
There was more than one way to pursue it, present it. Let’s say simply it was a savage attachment.
You held the gun. The gun held me. I was in love. I noticed things
§
Voices, consistent in their progression, in their movement toward change, haunted her up the gorge.
She received, as she must, a certain shadow, a passion. Were I a human— he said. His murmur, prehistoric, urgent. War bells rang at noontime. She turned and looked down the hill. Sweat stung her eye. Her hip tilted under the weight of the pack. Even if time is an illusion—more quickly—Montrose was now a speck of dust far down the ravine. An ordinary cosmos among the minerals. Silica shone. A salt, the taste of her labor, shattered under her feet as remnant snow.
§
You start. You are filled in silence. Death quietly reaches one way. One way I fought the other.
I knew you would tell me to pick one. A she, or a her, an I or a you. Consciousness is multi-fold. I refuse.
§
The leaves spill over her brow.
You are receiving, if you must, a certain shadow of passion. Were I a human
.
Perhaps I am the horse; perhaps misguided.
O the horse, the one misguided
& marked for the effort the one
to store and bury the dead
War bells ring at noontime
You would be foreign to the one account—
The sleeper’s hand is curled
A dry night has come
‡
Anchored to the grass, in the split dark between doors, I give myself over plainly to myth. Give plainly, word by word, to the earth’s activation. Through one door, your messages were flooding the room. Through the other door, I could only see watery figures, apparitions at various levels, triangles and wild neon-colored patterns. These messages were from his beings. Spaces between our thoughts we would cultivate.
And the rocks turned black and threw up shadows and the shadows on the rocks were
like birds as they lifted themselves and flew, only they did not fly. They hung still and
the stars wrecked me.
Maureen Alsop, PhD is the author of five books of poetry; her latest collection, Pyre is forthcoming from What Books Press.
Hyades Magazine 