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Reading Robinson Jeffers’
“See the Human Figure”
on a Cold Night in June
He was dying then
of loneliness I suppose, or
old age. It is a sad and lonely
end, one suited to him. It was
not a surprise, I’m sure. It came
to him as something familiar.
It is this dying self I imagine
still lingers, up from the rocks, from
the yew tree where his ashes are—
that fine gray chaos of bone and cinder
held tight in the hard-packed earth
with Una’s and the baby’s.
I lie back. What is it about these
words, these old-man images, that
obsess me so? What do they have
to do with me? Except that I know
what it is to be walled in on all sides
by poems and rain, by something
nameless and formless, yet so real
one can taste it. The candles give off
a thick yellow.
I blink at the words on my lap. The wind
at the roof hisses and his lonely presence—
filling the room like a scent—flees. It goes
off to the shore, to the yew that creaks
and groans but never breaks in the gale.
In this house—its warm heart
sighing loudly over the rain—
I am alone and so sick with poetry
I could almost die.
Rainbow
after Max Jacob
It is the hour of the night
that makes the mountains
cry out in pain and the rocks
groan beneath sure-footed animals.
The birds have all flown off
from here as though they were
poisoned, flying to the shore, for
that better horizon.
He stares at the ocean as though
he is dying and will never see it
again. He gazes for a long
time at the place the water,
meeting the land, makes
a powder of mist.
When he thinks he
can’t stand the pain any longer,
you, with fire roaring behind
you, appear on the rocks below,
climbing toward him with your
cross slung across your bleeding back.
When he stretches out his arms
toward you, everything vanishes—
the night, the sea, the screaming birds,
the animals roaming in the dark.
He follows you wherever it is you’re going
because he is, suddenly and
unexplainably, happy.
Crucifixion
after Anna Akhmatova
1.
Choirs of angels sang hymns
of praise to the holy
hour, doused in blood.
The curving sky
crumpled into
tears of fire.
“Father,” you prayed, “why?
why have you
forsaken me?”
“Mother,” you pleaded, “please!
please don’t cry
those tears—
those tears
like no one else’s tears—
for me…”
2.
Mary Magdalene pulled at
her long hair, threw dust
in the air and pounded the
dull drum of her chest.
The one you loved—
his face set like the skull-
shaped stone
beneath you—
stared at every
struggling movement
you made.
Your gray-haired mother
stood alone. No one looked
at her, with her eyes weeping
tears like they could
never imagine.
How—
in their limited understanding
of all that she kept hidden in
her pierced heart—
could they?
Easter Morning
1.
Where did the sun go? Its
yellow fingers pushed
through to him only
a moment ago. And now…
the room has turned
dull and quiet.
When he saw the sun’s
caressing rays—
how they clutched at his
failing body, caressing the
knobby limbs, the paper-thin
cloth the nurses wrapped him in—
he knew what it was.
2.
On the bed he was quiet.
He knew what was
happening to him.
The pure blue energy of
his life dilated
the windows
with reflection.
3.
A shadow smeared
the glass of his window. He
reached out from beneath the sheets
for it. His cracked lips
moved, as though tasting
something thick with juice.
4.
Angels proclaimed the dawn
just outside the hospital room.
He heard them and tried—
despite the tube—
to sing along.
5.
He saw the end coming.
It stained the day like
a thumbprint.
6.
The cross on the wall
moved slightly
all by itself,
an inch clock-wise on its nail.
7.
He was shadowless.
There wasn’t a gauntness
to him then. Only a light
coming from…
someplace beyond
our strange and limited
understanding.
8.
An early morning
yellow light overtook him
completely. It left us only
with something rapidly
turning to a pale, cooling dust.
Snowfall in October
Anticipation followed summer
each year. I waited, the
curtain holding me in.
I didn’t make one
move. Even as I longed
for the harvest
which went on like incest
in the fields around this house,
I was still. Beyond
the window—glowing blue
as the night with something
like holiness—a cloud of
dust and grain hung
between the sky and the earth.
I stood there—a pupil
in the pane’s shimmering eye.
The snow came early that
autumn afternoon,
blocking out the movements in the fields,
sloughing the mechanical sounds. I
sighed—
clouds of breath swirling en masse
across the wind-
chilled glass. Still
I didn’t move a muscle.
All poems Copyright (c) 2005 by Jamie Parsley