Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts Book

But he who is wisest among you, he also is only a discord and hybrid of plant and of ghost.

'Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra


NETTING
 
My father would have saved us, had the
occasion of fire arisen.
Sundays, each at our post,
we practiced'
his fine network of hoses lacing into perfect

webs. So much water,
and each of us a knot we felt so safe in
manning.
I never really understood the underpin
nings, miraculous nation
beneath the smooth lawn'

a private patriotism.
Nothing again was ever as dangerous, as
vulnerable. I know of father
less than I imagine, but in the end
all that we can know of anyone

is what we promised them. I know, there
fore,
that fire is something we can catch, unwit
tingly, like cold,
and that these tiny roads
woven round and round our property like a
spare set of roots,

is what we really are'a shadow map, a
future kept alive by
met commitments.
And at those junctions, the world seems as
private as public,
a well-kept secret

kept by all. Just as, deep in a cave, life can
survive
only because of forms of life outside that
will persist
in entering. So…
water to save us, and

profound curiosity'casting and trawling
and building a surface
able to truly hold us,
like gossip, or the smell of lilacs, or an
overheard song: soon
everyone has caught it.


The Geese

Today as I hang out the wash I see them again, a code
as urgent as elegant,
tapering with goals.
For days they have been crossing. We live beneath these geese
as if beneath the passage of time, or a most perfect heading.
Sometimes I fear their relevance.
Closest at hand,
between the lines,
the spiders imitate the paths the geese won't stray from,
imitate them endlessly to no avail:
things will not remain connected,
will not heal,
and the world thickens with texture instead of history,
texture instead of place.
Yet the small fear of the spiders
binds and binds
the pins to the lines, the lines to the eaves, to the pincushion bush,
as if, at any time, things could fall further apart
and nothing could help them
recover their meaning. And if these spiders had their way,
chainlink over the visible world,
would we be in or out? I turn to go back in.
There is a feeling the body gives the mind
of having missed something, a bedrock poverty, like falling
without the sense that you are passing through one world,
that you could reach another
anytime. Instead the real
is crossing you,
your body an arrival
you know is false but can't outrun. And somewhere in between
these geese forever entering and
these spiders turning back,
this astonishing delay, the everyday, takes place.


Tennessee June

This is the heat that seeks the flaw in everything
and loves the flaw.
Nothing is heavier than its spirit,
nothing more landlocked than the body within it.
Its daylilies grow overnight, our lawns
bare, then falsely gay, then bare again. Imagine
your mind wandering without its logic,
your body the sides of a riverbed giving in ...
In it, no world can survive
having more than its neighbors;
in it, the pressure to become forever less is the pressure
to take forevermore
to get there. Oh
let it touch you ...
The porch is sharply lit---little box of the body---
and the hammock swings out easily over its edge.
Beyond, the hot ferns bed, and fireflies gauze
the fat tobacco slums,
the crickets boring holes into the heat the crickets fill.
Rock out into that dark and back to where
the blind moths circle, circle,
back and forth from the bone-white house to the creepers unbraiding.
Nothing will catch you.
Nothing will let you go.
We call it blossoming---
the spirit breaks from you and you remain.

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