poem selection
from The Blue Marble
THE BLUE MARBLE, I
When I was small, I found in the hills a battered car,
the casualty of a fall, a vandal,
acid rain that ate the fabric from the wire.
The beauty of decaying things leaded
the blood of my eyes,
so I would think of it often, when I was alone,
the metal of the hood that bore
the colors of dusk,
the rust in patterns of the runoff
that longed to return.
But it never returned. Nothing does.
A little of nothing in everything.
A little of each
in suns that crash
and shards that are the diamonds of the bees.
*
The marriage of attention and imagination
is
out there, somewhere,
where science looks at alchemy and whispers,
I too dream of you.
How odd to be alive.
Alchemy reminds me.
Just today I was nursing a wound
and turned into a child.
The way it shone when I cleansed it.
It made me
careful. It made me look again.
As if the eye were lead,
and the dusk across the surface, gold.
*
If pasture scripture, so too the page.
Every blade drinks a language,
the way silence drinks a hymn,
or science the alchemical equipment.
Responsibility drinks the wonder that opens its eyes.
The year I was sick, I wrote a letter in my sleep.
I sent it to the moment before.
I so wanted to reach the place
my family came to rest.
When the letter arrived, my eyes had eyes.
Some days earth is such good company, I say hello.
I say, thank you, I missed you,
and feel my voice
vanishing across it,
as people do
and stone beneath the carved initial.
*
If one were one
with a tree, who would think to ask
a tree, the thought of whom is silence.
What branch would lean through the window
and whisper.
Plato saw learning as remembering,
which is when knowledge is something
we did not know we knew.
If you are lost, you are not alone.
When I am lost, I love to get more lost
where the streets curve
in deference to the rivers.
Me here, the planet there,
a gravity between us. It taught me how to run.
And when I ran, I felt a little freer
from the pull of it.
I felt the pull.
And when I stumbled, I went numb.
As if my flesh were flesh alone, and earth
earth.
*
I have walked this path in a game called Death
for Beginners,
tempted as I was to fall.
If I stepped on a fracture, I would scream
softly to myself.
For it was early,
the streets sedated in fog.
The drapes of homes burned dimly
if at all.
Long ago this place was naked.
Then the sidewalks came.
They laid their faces over
the eyes of gods
where the children pressed their hands.
You can see them still,
beneath the life that fructified the surface.
Like a superstition of graves.
*
The uneven path taught me to be careful.
My body taught me to extend my arms.
Balance, it said, is a variety of flight.
Alan Watts taught me. Asymmetry brings relief.
Like symmetry I echoed.
Like music in movies when you fall
in love with virtue.
Or music.
Or Alan Watts. A conversation
where the echo of the echo
curves
into a tree in a parking lot,
a joke among mourners, a child’s boo.
And everyone laughs because they are lonely.
A cross above the dresser gleams.
In accidental light, it glows and darkens.
In the body
of the planet, it pulses.
Breathes.
*
All is mind, he said,
his hand a figure in the field
that turned into a garden
where every bird is nameless.
Who has not looked for patterns in stone,
a face that says,
Did you think I forgot.
We were all so different then,
lost in a host
of undisclosed relations.
You are all alone out there,
he added,
and Earth dwindled to a marble in the dark.
Imagine our good fortune,
cradled in nothing, as all things are.
The sound of rain
running from the rain.
*
5,400 species of songbird, not to mention song.
5,400 breeds of nothing, the lost
inhalations of song,
in the bloodline of the unconceived.
And sometimes a crackle,
and a bird flutters out the mouths of children.
Take of this, my flesh, he said,
and he held up a tiny planet,
so small I thought it was an eye
without a pupil, a transparent ball
with a sky inside.
And smaller versions of ourselves.
*
I had a teacher who chanted holy
to bless each alley in the harbor town
where runaways gather,
an angel-dust in the eyes of a thousand windows,
a thousand forlorn cabs.
Holy the fire eaters, the tattooed girls
beneath an overpass braceleted in fog.
Holy, the breath that blushes the mirror,
notes of surprise
that make our names
vessels of the sacred.
Holy the dawn that dismantles
the logo on the office of silent affairs.
Holy the alif, the claw,
the dumpster, the epitaph to a library fire,
the kiln that killed an aunt. Holy the ditch
that ate a century, chased it with gasoline,
and woke, blind.
Holy, my teacher wept,
the word a vessel,
the sound so tender the vessel disappears.
Bruce Bond is the author of thirty books including, most recently, Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave, 2019), Words Written Against the Walls of the City (LSU, 2019), Scar (Etruscan, 2020), Behemoth (New Criterion Prize, Criterion Books, 2021), The Calling (Parlor, 2021), and Patmos (Juniper Prize, UMass, 2021). His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including seven editions of Best American Poetry. Presently he is Regents Emeritus Professor of English at the University of North Texas.