Of Forced Sightes And Trusty Ferefulness

Jorie Graham

Stopless wind, here are the columbine seeds I have collected. What we would do with them is different. Though both your trick and mine flowers blue and white with four stem tails and yellow underpetals. Stopless and unessential, half-hiss, half- lullaby, if I fell in among your laws, if I fell down into your mind, your snow, into the miles of spirit-drafts you drive, frenetic multitudes, out from the timber to open the ground and back to no avail, if I fell down, warmblooded, ill, into your endless evenness, into this race you start them on and will not let them win...? If I fell in? What is your law to my law, unhurried hurrying? At my remove from you, today, in your supremest calculation, re- adjustment, are these three birds scratching for dead bark beetles, frozen seeds, too late for being here yet only here, in the stenchfree cold. This is another current, river of rivers, this thrilling third-act love. Who wouldn't want to stay behind? They pack the rinds away, the blazing applecores, the frantic shadow-wings scribbling the fenceposts, window- panes. Meanwhile you turn, white jury, draft, away deep justice done. I don't presume to cross the distances, the clarity, but what grows in your only open hands? Or is digressive love, row after perfect greenhouse row, the garden you're out of for good, wind of the theorems, of proof, square root of light, chaos of truth, blinder than the mice that wait you out in any crack? This is the best I can do now for prayer—to you, for you—these scraps I throw my lonely acrobats that fall of your accord right to my windowsill: they pack it away, the grains, the accidents, they pack it deep into the rent heart of the blue spruce, skins in with spiky needles.... Oh hollow charged with forgetfulness, through wind, through winter nights, we'll pass, steering with crumbs, with words, making of every hour a thought, remembering by pain and rhyme and arabesques of foraging the formula for theft under your sky that keeps sliding away married to hurry and grim song.