The stars were his;
he’d breathed them in.
The Milky Way inside
was all around him,
a respiration of the night.
He had seen the Otherside
without idea, more beautiful
behind its veils of meaning,
invisibly far but known
like the stone in his pocket.
Who had let him in?
Why now at the stub of his life?
He’d been shown
how to climb the crevasse
to the top
where nothing
is what it is
because the is
is infinite. Yes,
he had felt
the great door opening,
night pouring into his lungs,
star streams in the dark
through the bay of his mind,
the night river full
of every sun
of every dawn rise
in the universe.
He knew he wasn’t
dying yet.
Many friends were gone,
many wiping their shoes
on the welcome mat of the end.
His turn would come around.
Cancer? Heart attack? Who knows?
Latvians, in a little town
on the border, hanged their Cleansed
from lamp posts, twenty of them,
(it was a small town),
before the Nazis invaded
and stole all their stuff.
Cancer, who knows?
Auto wreck, some terrible
slippage?
Who can second guess
the last of the strange
revelations?
Of course,
Pain and Fear are tricksters
They guide us to desert them;
hang on to their tails for the ride,
but don’t crawl
into their skins.
They’re already in them.
They will
serenely deign to destroy you.
Something else must come to us
from the night,
from the quaking ,
the dread supposings.
Something else
must open us wide,
roll us out
onto the cold, far road
to the Otherside, straight
as a thought can make it,
from nowhere to nowhere,
from lives of cowering
in desire, cowering
in the norm, praying it won’t
fall away and leave us
falling through the spaces.
Something else must open us wide
to climb from cowering in caution, up
the spine of the mind
into the night and its skeleton of stars,
climbing up into the currents
of the fecund nothing
forever ending, never over,
the space among the fires,
dark as the far end of it all,
with yes
everywhere we look,
bright as the fog of stars
exhaled into the night
and breathed back in
to the wholly ambiguous peace
in the deepest trust of our bodies.
(Image derived from photos by John Fowler and Ed Ogle.)
Nothing ushers 2018 in more elegantly than your Chaco poems… a deep reminder of the fact that we have lived and worked and loved and survived for millennia and our current situation will also pass. Thank you for your beautiful voice, as always.
Flooring and soaring–this poem delivers both sensations! Thank you for sharing it.
Oh, that we we can look up and see “the night river full / of every sun / of every dawn rise / in the universe”! A trillion trillion new days always overhead.
And what a perfect day to be reminded that the best, most robust building materials to construct ourselves come from our selves; not annual resolutions to work out or diet or organize the daily debris. “Something else / must open us wide” and “with yes / everywhere” we discover the blazing cosmos inside.
Barrett,
Great poem Chaco Nites. Brought back many memories. Thank you for all you do. Your poetry is inspirational. Your articles are honest and well-researched. Peace for the New Year.