MEDITATION AT RIO DEVA
How to distinguish a trick
Of the eye
From wind in a chestnut
Or waking from dream
Where boundaries
Dissolve and give way
The body strapped
To its shadow
Weighs no more
The alphanumerical
Values of letters
Do not make the name
Of God any more say-able
All knowledge is arcane
And thus prevents
Easy access
To the immanent beyond
It’s hard to get used to
As when detained
By a floating fleeting thought
You see the sun emerge
From the clouds
Like a dew-wet fox
From underbrush
And only now
Recollect the overcast
The gloomy humidity
The winding road
Through tunnels
And forest
That left you here
Water eddies and rushes
And some unseen blossoming
Offers an unheard of
Sweetness
Without cloy
Sharp-edged citrus
Mixed with cold
Spray from the rapids
The river continues
Like the thread of a story
Spun out
An ordinary story
Slips and lapses
Where you expect them
To look back
Who cannot look back
Is an act of revision
In the mountains
You think of the forces
Behind form
The build-up
The long wearing down
Scree clatter
The riverbank lined
With flatten oval
Palm-sized stones
The mountain unmoved
The mountain transient
In a summer of rains
Rain like accusation
Daily rain the mountain sheds
And the river conveys
A legible serpentine script
Through what erodes
Around what remains
–
LET ME TAKE YOUR SECOND QUESTION FIRST
When one writes, The silky plumage of a crow’s extended wing, no corvid flies forth. No mulberry trees emerge from valley fog. Perhaps all is quiet in the cocoonery. From here, it is hard to hear the rustle of fibers pulled long, the hot air vented. As the crystal suggests the enduring pattern of its atoms, in these words, one hopes to suggest a shape. Not a rook or magpie, not a jackdaw or jay, but a crow.
–
THE SPIRIT’S LANGUAGE
We were still learning
The spirit’s language
To sense the spartan
Negative space between objects
To navigate the fragile
Edge of phenomena
As one does in a dance
The practice continues
Although the music’s stopped
The musician on break
Or gone for the day
Something of the dance
Is not contained
In the notations or the count
The something within a body
We might call the self
The spirit understood this
Before we did
In the gestures and contortions
The gaps and silences
Of its language
–
REITERATION WITH MOUNTAIN
What you said
Returned echoed
The fog stood still
The mountain moved
~
Eric Pankey is the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University. His recent books have been published by Milkweed Editions.