FILENAME: poetry ORIGINAL AUTHOR: HTML AUTHOR: jonathan duggins HTML CREATED: 2-Feb-99 3:41 PM

Poetry

November 1992

Copyright (c) 1992 First Things 27 ( November 1992): 12, 27, 36.

Once again, we are on the road early,
driving to see our son
wrestle with cancer for gold.
Clouds fall like a heavy eyelid
over the eastern sky, crowding
the tender light against the horizon–
healthy crimson, healthy orange compressed
by gray as thick as
blasts in leukemic marrow.
Birds fly everywhere before us: electrons
energized to higher shells by
the meager dawn. Life will, life must,
make do on little.
What do you think of all the beauty
squandered along this mournful road?
Tragedy may induce myopia.
Still, I notice the distant trees
like a remembrance of your hair; the young
light on a field, the color
of your neck; and the
unseen sun's halo, dark and
pink as your areola.
Turning on the radio, I hear
Billy Graham preach Christ crucified and
raised as God's sufficient grace, and I think
of our son clinging gracefully to life like
the stubborn leaves of
red November oaks.

From the eastern rim Jorgea throws a rock
into the deep and we hear nothing in return.
An American lady says as she walks away
that it's a nice place to visit and her voice
trails off. And "breathtaking" says
someone else we'll never get to know.
The Japanese teenagers stare solemnly
down while the people from France
speak in interested tones as they point
toward the west then north, south. Our
leaders are not here. We are ungoverned,
listening, needlessly, for the lost rock.
And I think of the old woman who told me
she could never see the joy in staring into
this large hole in the earth. "Give me a casino,"
she affirmed that day, "where losses and wins
are strictly defined, where my feet are secure
and chance answers back as clear as a bell."
Jorgea puts a quarter into the viewer, moves it
every which way. The old woman is dead and
he is fourteen, seeing a country that's not
quite his, living as if the world were all
Guadalajara, where he was born, trusting,
like home, this lovely and foreign edge.

Dancing, in mind at least, toward a stage of untested embrace –
Virginal spirits grasped in the shared, unexpected spectacle
Of one season's end, and another's hesitant birth.
The familiar overture of early winter, glimpsed for a moment
By eyes that found delight in a scene of colliding awe,
Of wonder wrapped at the heart of such commonness.
A place and time of grace, if in its ordinary face;
Should we await another? A radiant scene,
Freighted with patient miracles; obscured
Only for those without eyes to see:
A stubborn season's embrace of its own natured demise.
Shadows pressing ahead of hastening night,
Bearers of brittle silences, descending
With neither courtesy nor contempt upon grasses and fields
Below, announcing the end of this reluctant vision.
Yet greet it we must with comprehending defiance,
Without the residue of resentment toward what must and will be.
Birth, on winter's other side, must yield to ordinary death
Before rising into dancing convergence,
When again the last will be first, and the silenced speak.