Donald Revell

Crickets

in memory of Barbara Guest

1.

A canyon in the air,
A cloud to stand on:
I needed them,
And each, my Soul,
Like that mountain on the sun
You moved one good, strange day
Away from the fires
Into cold space,
Is past my strength.

2.

I was a boy dreaming I was a boy.
There were powers pressing me down
Into a cold place, and then
It was cold no longer.
Many colors of grass. Many trees.
My life unfolded there, fifty years and more;
And now, in a cold rain, I'm the boy again,
Pressed down even harder than at first,
But with only dirt beneath me.

3.

My poor saint breaks the clouds
   Butter on a blue plate
   A dog beneath the table

My poor saint breaks the clouds
   What language is that
   What color

My poor saint breaks the clouds
   It is morning still
   The sky stays near

My poor saint breaks the clouds
   And each is a boy
   Each is dreaming

My poor saint breaks the clouds
   It being a good strange day
   And the ground is fires underneath me
       
4.

Where a cloud is tiger eyes upon the mountain
My death has daughters,
And one of them is mine.
In the climbing up, she'd grown yellow hair.
In the coming down, it was white
Although, for one moment, it glowed
Bright coppery-red in the sunset light.

Only at the point of death
Where my sunflower wishes to go
Where my sunflower wishes to go
Where my sunflower wishes to go
Do the strong words
Tiger      Sunset      Red
Drive the whole weight of heaven like a single blade
through the mind of a man
and every mountain he has ever loved.

5.

The rasp of motors teaching Chinese babies air guitar...
What is lovelier?
Nothing is lovelier, now it appears to me I'm dying,
Than crickets singing in broad daylight,
Eleven o'clock in the morning, a perfect
Indian summer day.

I read men in their faces, but God
I read in His creatures.
The creak of crickets, or is it only one?
No way to know, but only
After long and dear acquaintanceship with time
Does eternity come clear.
Only one cricket--
Just as I thought.

6.

   With that final detail of hair tossed from the window....
                  --Barbara Guest
          
In the rough-hewn entryway at Linne Calodo
Calling to the dog, to a strange dog
"Come home"--

If ever she steps out of that entryway
Into the full sunlight, my heart
Will leave my heart.
What happens then?

Snow in New York.
I'm trembling, it's
Minimal?
It's snow.
But this trembling, it's
Not minimal.
Paint it. Cricket. Cricket. Paint it.
It.
With that final detail of hair tossed from the window.

7.

I wrote my autobiography backwards
Years ago,
And in the white years since,
I've waited to be born.
It's always that way: catastrophe
Whitens all we are.
On the moving sidewalk at the Vatican Pavilion,
New York City World's Fair, 1964,
I passed The Pietà and was changed forever,
Seeing how very much younger
Mary was than was
Her murdered son.
God may be dangerous,
Better known by our not knowing.
Mary is nearer,
A little winter love in her white corner.
Mary is nearer,
And the cricket sits aside,
Chanting eternity like a lullaby to the murdered man
From roots of the white grass.

8.

I was a boy dreaming
I am a boy, I was,
I was dreaming,
And it's Christmas now;
And now is the time to turn
My poem, my Christmas,
Over to incendiaries.
Saint William Blake, pray for me;
Saint Rimbaud, pray for me;
Saint Antonin Artaud, burn
New eyes into my head
With a cigarette end.
Otherwise,
I am toys
Lost on the polar ice.

---

Poet, translator and critic Donald Revell is the author of ten previous collections of poetry, most recently A Thief of Strings (Alice James Books, 2007). He is a Professor of English at the University of Utah. contents | previous