Cached Oct. 12, 2012, from intertwingled.net
The Dream of the Unified Field
by Jorie Graham
1
On my way to bringing you the leotard
you forgot to include in your overnight bag,
the snow started coming down harder.
I watched each gathering of leafy flakes
melt round my footfall.
I looked up into it--late afternoon but bright.
Nothing true or false in itself. Just motion. Many strips of
motion. Filaments of falling marked by the tiny certainties
of flakes. Never blurring yet themselves a cloud. Me in it
and yet
moving easily through it, black Lycra leotard balled into
my pocket,
your tiny dream in it, my left hand on it or in it
to keep
warm. Praise this. Praise that. Flash a glance up and try
to see
the arabesques and runnels, gathering and loosening, as they
define, as a voice would, the passaging through from
the-other-than-
human. Gone as they hit the earth. But embellishing.
Flourishing. The road with me on it going on through. In-
scribed with the present. As if it really
were possible to exist, and exist, never to be pulled back
in, given and given never to be received. The music
of the footfalls doesn't stop, doesn't
mean. Here are your things, I said.
2
Starting home I heard--bothering, lifting, then
bothering again--
the huge flock of starlings massed over our
neighborhood
these days; heard them lift and
swim overhead through the falling snow
as though the austerity of a true, cold thing, a verity,
the black bits of their thousands of bodies swarming
then settling
overhead. I stopped. All up and down the empty oak
they stilled. Every limb sprouting. Every leafy backlit
body
filling its part of the empty crown. I tried to count--
then tried to estimate--
but the leaves of this wet black tree at the heart of
the storm--shiny--
river through limbs, back onto limbs,
scatter, blow away, scatter, recollect--
undoing again and again the tree without it ever ceasing to be
Foliage of the tree of the world's waiting.
Of having waited a long time and
still having
to wait. Of trailing and screaming.
Of engulfed readjustments. Of blackness redisappearing
into
downdrafts of snow. Of indifference. Of indifferent
reappearings.
I think of you
back of me now in the bright house of
your friend
you love.
I had looked--as I was leaving--through the window
to see you, slick in your magic,
pulling away from the wall--
I watch the head explode then recollect, explode, recollect.
3
Then I heard it, inside the swarm, the single cry
of the crow. One syllable--one--inside the screeching and the
skittering,
inside the constant repatterning of a thing not nervous yet
not ever
still--but not uncertain--without obedience
yet not without law--one syllable--
black, shiny, twirling on its single stem,
rooting, one foot on the earth,
twisting and twisting--
and then again--a little further off this time--down the
ravine, voice inside a head, filling a head....
See, my pocket is empty now. I let my hand
open and shut in there. I do it again. Two now, skull and
pocket
with their terrified inhabitants.
You turn the music up. The window nothing to you, liquid, dark,
where now your mother has come back to watch.
Closeup, he's blue--streaked iris blue, india-ink blue--and
black--an oily, fiery set of blacks--none of them
true--as where hate and order touch--something that cannot
become known. Stages of black but without
graduation. So there is no direction.
All of this happened, yes. Then disappeared
into the body of the crow, chorus of meanings,
layers of blacks, then just the crow, plain, big,
lifting his claws to walk thrustingly
forward and back--indigo, cyanine, beryl, grape, steel ... Then suddenly he
wings and--braking as he lifts
the chest in which an eye-sized heart now beats--
--he's up--a blunt clean stroke--
one ink-streak on the early evening snowlit scene--
See the gesture of the painter?--Recall the
crow?--Place him quickly on his limb as he comes sheering in,
close to the trunk, to land--Is he now
disappeared again?
5
....long neck, up, up with the head,
eyes on the fingertips, bent leg, shift of
the weight--turn--No, no, begin again ...
What had she seen, Madame Sakaroff, at Stalingrad, now in
her room of mirrors tapping her cane
as the piano player begins the interrupted Minuet again
and we line up right foot extended, right
hand extended, the Bach mid-phrase--
Europe? The dream of Europe?--midwinter afternoon,
rain at the windowpane, ceilings at thirty feet and coffered
floating over the wide interior spaces ...
No one must believe in God again I heard her say
one time when I had come to class too soon
and had been sent to change. The visitor had left,
kissing her hand, small bow, and I had seen her (from the curtain)
(having forgotten I was there)
turn from the huge pearl-inlaid doors she had just closed,
one hand still on the massive, gold, bird-headed knob,
and see--a hundred feet away--herself--a woman in black in
a mirrored room--
saw her not shift her gaze but bring her pallid tensile hand--
as if it were not part of her--slowly down from
the ridged, cold, feathered knob and, recollected, fixed upon
that other woman, emigree,
begin to move in stiffly towards her ... You out there
now,
you in here with me--I watched the two of them,
black and black, in the gigantic light,
glide at each other, heads raised, necks long--
me wanting to cry out--where were the others?--wasn't it late?
the two of her like huge black hands--
clap once and once only and the signal is given--
but to what?--regarding what?--till closer-in I saw
more suddenly
how her eyes eyed themselves: no wavering:
like a vast silver page burning: the black hole
expanding:
like a meaning coming up quick from inside that page--
coming up quick to seize the reading face--
each face wanting the other to take it--
but where? and from where?--I was eight--
I saw the different weights of things,
saw the vivid performance of the present,
saw the light rippling almost shuddering where her body finally
touched
the image, the silver film between them like something that would have
shed itself in nature now
but wouldn't, couldn't, here, on tight,
between, not thinning, not slipping off to let some
seed-down
through, no signal in it, no information ... Child,
what should I know
to save you that I do not know, hands on this windowpane?--
The storm: I close my eyes and,
standing in it, try to make it mine. An inside
thing. Once I was.... once, once.
It settles, in my head, the wavering white
sleep, the instances--they stick, accrue,
grip up, connect, they do not melt,
I will not let them melt, they build, cloud and cloud,
I feel myself weak, I feel the thinking muscle-up--
outside, the talk-talk of the birds--outside,
strings and their roots, leaves inside the limbs,
in some spots the skin breaking--
but inside, no more exploding, no more smoldering, no more,
inside, a splinter colony, new world, possession
gripping down to form,
wilderness brought deep into my clearing,
out of the ooze of night,
limbed, shouldered, necked, visaged, the white--
now the clouds coming in (don't look up),
now the Age behind the clouds, The Great Heights,
all in there, reclining, eyes closed, huge,
centuries and centuries long and wide,
and underneath, barely attached but attached,
like a runner, my body, my tiny piece of
the century--minutes, houses going by--The Great
. . Heights--
anchored by these footsteps, now and now,
the footstepping--now and now--carrying its vast
white sleeping geography--mapped--
not a lease--possession--"At the hour of vespers
in a sudden blinding snow,
they entered the harbor and he named it Puerto de
7
San Nicolas and at its entrance he imagined he
could see
its beauty and goodness, sand right up to the land
where you can put the side of a ship. He thought
he saw
Indians fleeing through the white before
the ship ... As for him, he did not believe what his
crew
told him, nor did he understand them well, nor they
him. In the white swirl, he placed a large cross
at the western side of
the harbor, on a conspicuous height,
as a sign that Your Highness claim the land as
Your own. After the cross was set up,
three sailors went into the bush (immediately erased
from sight by the fast snow) to see what kinds of
trees. They captured three very black Indian
women--one who was young and pretty.
The Admiral ordered her clothed and returned to
her land
courteously. There her people told
that she had not wanted to leave the ship,
but wished to stay on it. The snow was wild.
Inside it, though, you could see
this woman was wearing a little piece of
gold on her nose, which was a sign there was
gold
on that land-"--