Each According To Its Kind
The blue heron glides like God did
across the face of the waters
when all was void. In the Beginning
of Here, that’s when. Queried
back then, He just said “I am.” An eternity
of beginnings was before our here
and now, as will be after, and for all we know
God’s face might still be running over
waters in voids that begin
all sorts of places in infinite space.
But God’s face could not ghost along
the pond’s placid skin like the heron’s
murky cross does, because God
hadn’t yet unmixed light from dark.
Always some dark lingers,
even yet, in the corners of day
and some light softens the night.
Beyond a stolid line of trees, that brood
above the pond and glower within it
like shrouded shades of eternal forms
that here and now can show only in reflection,
from a Big Box parking lot these trees hide,
an unmuffled motorcycle throttles up
then down. Its aroused bark and cackle
summons memory from idle repose
of a Homelite chainsaw that left
my hearing numb yet still ringing
in a silence of suddenly holy woods
when I stilled it to stand still and sweating
in a bitter blue haze that lingered.
I was busy young then and thought nothing
of the void, remembered no glorious clouds
before I came, just nothing—and nothing
came to mind of after. The heron
alights to traipse the muddy shore
in a slow stately stalking. Unfazed
by the world’s noise, he’ll fly away
only when I stir myself to trudge up
the road to begin yet another day
by hunkering with other gray old solons
who each morning take up three tables
clutching one-buck coffees at McDonalds.
“All too soon,” I reply to the eldest of us
elders, to the portly one whose long beard
divides into three ashen clumpy cones
like God’s does as He lounges languidly
buck naked across the Sistine ceiling
in strenuous inertia, playing finger fiddle
with Adam, “oceans will boil up, the earth
will fissure in enormous cracks,
mountains will explode spilling molten rivers,
and horned monsters from hellish depths
will clamber forth upon the land
where lightning will streak from end to end,
and sinners-from-saved will once-and-for-all
be winnowed, and it won’t matter a jot
if the black guy in the White House
is a Kenyan Muslim.” To such sagacity,
he shrugs and turns. And my reveries
resume, lingering on the heron
rearing backwards, widespread as it alights.
As if to surrender. I smell the fryolator,
sweet as fat bubbling over ancient coals
under infinity smeared with light.
I hear the tired morning cheer, the ching
of money, and I feel an old spine ache
in a plastic chair. But I see the heron,
blue as evening shadows, as it imprints
a trident track with each slow strut
across glistening mud. In dulled ears
I hear without listening to the flat voice
of the sage, who looks like God but is not God
speaking of a struggle between giants
and ravens, but suddenly with his words,
“defensive end,” I see inside the blank eye
of the heron a black moon at the center
of a white sun, and spectral visions erase
like morning mist as I my mind glides back
into the only daylight my kind is given.
across the face of the waters
when all was void. In the Beginning
of Here, that’s when. Queried
back then, He just said “I am.” An eternity
of beginnings was before our here
and now, as will be after, and for all we know
God’s face might still be running over
waters in voids that begin
all sorts of places in infinite space.
But God’s face could not ghost along
the pond’s placid skin like the heron’s
murky cross does, because God
hadn’t yet unmixed light from dark.
Always some dark lingers,
even yet, in the corners of day
and some light softens the night.
Beyond a stolid line of trees, that brood
above the pond and glower within it
like shrouded shades of eternal forms
that here and now can show only in reflection,
from a Big Box parking lot these trees hide,
an unmuffled motorcycle throttles up
then down. Its aroused bark and cackle
summons memory from idle repose
of a Homelite chainsaw that left
my hearing numb yet still ringing
in a silence of suddenly holy woods
when I stilled it to stand still and sweating
in a bitter blue haze that lingered.
I was busy young then and thought nothing
of the void, remembered no glorious clouds
before I came, just nothing—and nothing
came to mind of after. The heron
alights to traipse the muddy shore
in a slow stately stalking. Unfazed
by the world’s noise, he’ll fly away
only when I stir myself to trudge up
the road to begin yet another day
by hunkering with other gray old solons
who each morning take up three tables
clutching one-buck coffees at McDonalds.
“All too soon,” I reply to the eldest of us
elders, to the portly one whose long beard
divides into three ashen clumpy cones
like God’s does as He lounges languidly
buck naked across the Sistine ceiling
in strenuous inertia, playing finger fiddle
with Adam, “oceans will boil up, the earth
will fissure in enormous cracks,
mountains will explode spilling molten rivers,
and horned monsters from hellish depths
will clamber forth upon the land
where lightning will streak from end to end,
and sinners-from-saved will once-and-for-all
be winnowed, and it won’t matter a jot
if the black guy in the White House
is a Kenyan Muslim.” To such sagacity,
he shrugs and turns. And my reveries
resume, lingering on the heron
rearing backwards, widespread as it alights.
As if to surrender. I smell the fryolator,
sweet as fat bubbling over ancient coals
under infinity smeared with light.
I hear the tired morning cheer, the ching
of money, and I feel an old spine ache
in a plastic chair. But I see the heron,
blue as evening shadows, as it imprints
a trident track with each slow strut
across glistening mud. In dulled ears
I hear without listening to the flat voice
of the sage, who looks like God but is not God
speaking of a struggle between giants
and ravens, but suddenly with his words,
“defensive end,” I see inside the blank eye
of the heron a black moon at the center
of a white sun, and spectral visions erase
like morning mist as I my mind glides back
into the only daylight my kind is given.
