Marianne BoruchO Gods of Smallest Clarity
If only those perennial opposites, the bully and the sweet worried one slept, kept sleeping. Not side by side, not the lion and the lamb, just that most ordinary blind passage, brief and profound, as it happens all over the planet. I mean the prince who's happy with gardening, and the other kind plotting someone's downfall, each going under for the night. Which is to say, not our usual taking turns at it, not Greenwich or daylight savings or eight flight hours from here equals five hours early or late but right now, this minute, by my marvelous powers of desperation and delusion, it's soldier and monk, Sunni and Shiite, republican, democrat, all Muslims and Christians and Jews and those of us quietly not anything to speak of, no reason or rhyme or respectively about it, no tit for tat but every one sleeping. And the president curled fetal, his aides and think-tankers all twitching in their dreams as dogs do, on the scent or the chase, hours, many hours to come. For that matter, the Pope is drifting off and the greeter from Wal-Mart, and the magician come out of a long day's practice in a sword-crossed box rests now, exactly like the oldest woman asleep on her side, empty as the young docent at Ellis Island already certain it's robot-work, telling the country's vast sad story of promise and trouble. And I think so many miners home from their dark to this gladder one, sprawled out on their beds where exhaustion is fierce, no longer patient. Every child in the world sleeping too, hunger, once there was, but not here in this dream, no gunflash, no flood. Every mother minus panic. Every father finding his daughters, his sons right where they should be. Even the torturers gone into that place they might nightmare what they've done. But not yet, not for a moment. And of those who were done to, for them the rope and hood and diamond-toothed wire, all banished a few hours, forgotten as dream is, in this, the real dream to ink it out, beyond reach. Believe me, I want to see the despicable go down as much as you do, and the innocent shine. But that's sleeping too. Or so I try, an experiment which may be stupid, full of less not more, as in pointless, as in hopeless, as in less than nothing because--o gods of the smallest clarity, let nothing happen for an hour, for six hours. Rage. Let that sleep too, its sorrow no longer a brilliant rant, no longer anything, a wash, a confluence of great waters seen from a distance, the horizon a matter of on and on where a speck out there might well be a boat, the figure at the oars untangling and stretching out. One eye closed, then the other: welcome no moon, no stars.
Marianne Boruch's recent books include Poems: New and Selected (Oberlin, 2004) and a collection of essays on poetry, In the Blue Pharmacy (Trinity, 2005). She teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University.
