Today's poem is by Bruce Bond

Invention of the Wilderness
       

When a fire pins its banner to the wood,
it reveals something of the wilderness
no wilderness can know, something locked up
in the structure of the branch that longs
to flower, as those who would refrain from pleasure
long to fissure as their eyelids close.
I have had that dream; that dream had me
listen to a sad chorale, and the notes
with their heavy progress to the grave
of Christ took on the slow magnanimous
purpose of thorns and petals and pews in rows.
It hardly has to do with me, this progress,
but there it was in the skull at the center
of a dark that just gets darker as you go.

*

Any wonder the great observers kept
an eye on the emptiness and, in awe,
mapped the graveyard of the sky, star
by star. They made a schedule of surprises.
A god's dream pinned with fire turned
the vortex of the clock that cannot die.
It marked time in increments foreign
to our times alone and suffered in our
music. The great listeners heard a song
in the spheres as something other than
its passing, not life on earth, but the field
it plows, the paradise. It drew them close:
to see in the scatter the wheel's return,
each breath held like a leaf against a river.

*

When I walk into the wilderness,
I become two people, one of them
visibly me incarnate, the other some
member of a great disorder, eyeless
as the leaves that rise, and still they see.
Still the rumors of a wisdom I cannot
fathom. When I cannot sleep, I play
Scrabble. As the words click in place,
the other side of them rises like film
in a developing pan. Amazing, how
much, how easily my animals sleep.
When my cat looks in the mirror, he
sees no cat. The season of his illness,
I felt, across my sternum, no cat too.

*

I was a maker of birds and so I called
them in a language I did not speak.
I worked night and day until the one
was the other, because I had the power.
My heart began to flicker, scared by doors
that closed slow like the eyes of graves.
I asked myself, as your kingdom grows,
do you wake, alone. Does a swallow
cry in the wilderness that is getting
hotter, smaller. Do you smell the scent
of feathers in the fire, because you have
that power. Do you sleep less at night,
more at noon, at work. As you lay down
your heavy tools, does the cage door open.

*

When a floating casket catches fire,
the eyes on shore water in the smoke.
As if the eye might touch what it sees,
although it never does. It is not fire.
Never the blaze it bears across the lens,
the coffin that pins its signature to ours.
The last of the fuel consumes the fire
and us who watch it happen from a distance.
I am always a step away, in the province
of the unsaid, where the eyes are hung.
I am always out there, in the distance.
How else do I hear the dead in the bells
and so commit whatever praise remains.
Above the signatures, beyond the smoke.

*

The night my father died, I lay awake
and listened to the frogs in my garden,
and I thought of a North American
song with headlights across the far field,
how they dimmed into a cold sensation
of ruin and communion, in a language
without fathers, not as we know them,
lose them. Lying in that wilderness felt
personal and not, which was its mercy.
Frogs sing, one to all, and so, to me,
when I am nowhere to be heard. So yes,
a man could feel one with the One, free
in the violent wind, and sign his poems,
breathe with a maddened need to breathe.

*

Eyes know more about a boundary
than a mind can see. I read therefore
I blink a lot, so swift the guillotine
of shade that falls, I go a little blind.
A body breathes or it dies. It holds
its breather in, the way I held a girl
when I was a child and unconscious,
and then, as I woke up, I let her go.
Sentimentalists of chaos know so
little of their subject. A broken child
dreams of shelter, and who does not.
I dream of earth on fire in the distance.
I dream of shelter enough. I tell myself,
if only I were better. Safer, kinder.

*

The long illness, the nervous breakdown,
the pain that tore your mother's mind
to a flock of leaves, they have returned
to tell you, the wilderness is everywhere.
And you can find comfort there because
where else. You can wheel a woman's chair
down the brief hall and pause there: this
is my world now, she says, and the woods
will give you words and never words enough.
You will see them in a window, before you
turn, past these strangers, down the hall.
I is not an I, I read. And never nothing,
I add, come nightfall, but some stained
glass of dust and tears before we name it.

*

I knew a boy who took acid and crawled
out a window on the seventh floor.
I did that too, in a dream, and lived.
The difference between us was night
and day. Thus ambiguous at dawn.
Reading the dream as a dream is how
reading was invented. If you want to
know where a dream ends, the world
begins, ask the boy. Are clouds beyond
the window's cross so beautiful it hurts,
like joy hurled at the speed of crystal
striking a wall. Are you that unloved,
that ecstatic. Has a world against your
eye caught fire. Do you think you can fly.

*

There is a lion in the distance. A star.
And when he roars, the heart is no one
and no one else. In a gentler season,
we all could be a little kinder, darker,
taking time in the impersonal woods
full of bird calls and carnivorous vines.
If I felt safer, less in need of shelter,
I could be the lion and the meat he eats
and the crushing beauty of the sun
that passes through the impersonal sky.
But when I wake, I am the I that wakes
inside the unseen woods that never sleep.
When I see my home from a distance,
the lords and lions are vanishing from earth.

*

The rhinoceros before you, slaughtered
for its horn, lies disfigured, dismantled,
slow to rot beneath a stream of pincers,
suns, seizures of rain. Its magnificence
fades crowned in flies. Everything returns,
and nothing does. Everything gets eaten.
The horn capsules swallowed as a male
enhancer bear witness. There are men
who will try anything these days, and still
they wilt, they turn their faces to the wall.
The supplements they eat do nothing.
Still they eat. They swallow their prayers
and dream of better wilder lovers, girls
who whisper, Be careful what you wish for.

*

With all the smoke and mirrors in the world,
I do know this. The coral reefs are dying.
Now you see them, now the skeletons
dissolve. When I was an invisible child,
I grew so frightened of the dark, I kept
my door open. Then, as I grew older,
I felt safer with it closed. Whenever
I cannot close my eyes for fear of what
I find there, I find it harder still to open.
Either way, the ocean washes in.
It takes of my blood and washes out
a little warmer. It takes the way earth takes
on the flames you see in satellite stills.
To the south, the hems of angels, burning.

*

When my spirit broke in half and faltered,
an angel came to me and said, let me
tell you a story. Once there was a man
who so loved a woman in hell, he played
a harp to open up a passage: remember
when music blew the apples into bloom.
This was it, the first song, the song of loss.
Long before he looked back, exceeding
his given measure of control, nature's
poisons flowered through the eye and deeper.
He stood apart, just enough. Shadows
parted. Music died and lived and died
to hear the skylark answer, to see the limbs
of the lemon and the pear bow down.

*

If a mother ever sang you to sleep,
you need no explanation, no better reason
to reply. A lullaby opens a passage,
and you fall, you sink, and when you wake,
you tear your limbs by a thousand roots
and tentacles away. I cannot tell you
where our need for mastery began.
Only that a song could frame the better
reason to sleep, and later, to awaken.
Later still, to leave your home on fire.
Oblivion reminds me, the ice is burning,
and who is not. Who has not longed to be
more radiant, then less and less, to read
in the darkening path one great longing.

*

For the sad chorale is never sad alone.
It moves with the sure, slow provenance
of processionals and ships and somnolent
clouds that give the feathered light a place
to fall. It plows the cinders like a moon,
then carries the child in its arms to lay her
in bed and whisper something sweet,
something about a fortress in the wilderness,
what some fine day a wilderness can be.
One morning you will unlatch the glass
and breathe the leaves from the branches.
You will love a limb's measures of surrender
as you love your freedom, as amen loves
its tension and sigh. To ask the silence in.

*

What I wish for the earth is a new mind
by which I mean a truer conversation
that listens close, the way a singer must
when a bird in the back of the room calls,
when she hears again the voice she dreamt,
assuming it was hers. It broke her in two,
remember. It shattered into a hundred
to join the great migrations of the south.
You were there too. You were a traveler
and carried your guitar like a language.
We were all there together. Remember.
You opened your case and birds flew out.
And the stretch of sky we took for dead
launched a thousand candles in the dark.

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Copyright © 2023 Bruce Bond All rights reserved
from Birmingham Poetry Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission