Artist

Artist

for my teacher, Mrs. Couchman

For it is important that awake people be awake,

or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;

the signals we give—yes or no, or maybe—

should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

                                                                William Stafford

                                                                A Ritual to Read to Each Other

I remember I said (and I’m still saying)

I’m not afraid

of the dark necessarily but instead

the clumsy thumbs that knead

without knowing what it is

they hold in their closed over hands:

domed, cold, not at all knowing

the solitary

soul they've clutched has no other

desire

but to be flown of them, to be relieved

of the meat under the thumb, the muscle

that clutches them

by the throat where all the breath

that comes and goes stops to pause,

where once

a flutter has come, what can easily be

summed up for a breeze bringing 

the feathers that function the breast

of a heron to something of a still

pole, whose one misleading reded

leg is tucked

up from the river, invisible, and

a patient wait is braced

for the gill that shifts the gloss

of the rock to one slim tincture,

monotonous to a dull eye, a change

only the bird could make out

and strike into and come up

with that dripping fish of a soul

speared clean

through and through, flapping past

every scale the very last

of the dropping water.  It can’t help 

but let it all

fall back down into the still

going- on- toward- the- sea- stream.

Maybe it’s an obnoxiously hot day

and the predator has had

enough and flies of content

with one or two down her gullet.

I remember saying

while I watched the heron and her

fish, that I’d stay

out in the dark more if I could see

the way owls see

and I’d keep

watch on a limb

of a tree, and not seem to mind

not knowing the name of it

or how long it would be before

it might fall

by rot or wind or saw.

It’s enough to walk

confident in the lightness

(even the moon’s up during the day,

and often, so why

is it only croaned with night?)

Consider: it is

because quite simply

she’s light and the one closest eye

opening and closing

with trusted prediction and symmetry,

maybe that is what it takes to

make the edge

of the spectral woods come up soft

the way the humble

thumb of my teacher pushes away spaces

in a thick lump of wet

dense clay:

I watch the artist

begin to shape the cocoa colored rabbit

only she perceives in the dense block

of river mud, how she

held the talent of it

in both her hands

knowing it was inspiration

itself 

and she drew and smoothed

away the spaces

and made the could-be-sleeping-

could-be-chewing

little thing whole

without adding a thing or

even especially

taking a thing away.  It was

all enough to be shaped

in the face and known in the waiting

shoulders, in the rising

or falling hearing

ears.  This river

mud came up from the kind

of dark I want to walk into

and come to know:

to roll it and pinch it and sniff it,

to lift all the while and to keep it

to teach it to teach me 

to know the difference 

between warding off

what’s lost and coming up the road

asking for directions, teach it 

to teach me to see

how casually she can know

because haven't we spent a long time

in the dark and aren't we’re confident

now, that the hand reaching

toward us is a claw we draw 

back from don't we know and don't

we blink in the knowing

without accusation

and watch from that far off place

inside ourselves

how we shift from rabbit

to fish and swim quick past that scissor

beak crashing against

the stone, and to swim deep

beneath the overhang of the boulder

and gill furiously until we are calm enough

beside the cool mud

until we can begin to rub a hollow spot

for ourselves

and let ourselves

come undone, to be enough

shape in our own two hands,

homage to the teacher who taught us,

to be made a shape

we’ll go out into the world as,

dark or light,

and confident of our footing

of our beginning

to walk.