by
Davis Taylor
For
Becky
and
No One
“A Crane Cries from the Shade. Its Young Answers It.”
(To J. W.)
Something I can’t name keeps me awake—
not fear, more like a stallion’s dank,
quivering muzzle thrust into my chest.
At dusk I watched raptors winging north
high over the pines at the hayfield’s edge,
as if on pilgrimage to slake their blood.
Is it love’s sting scatters them like stars,
and keeps me up past hours shuddering against
a nameless passion, a wordless charge, till over
the thawing land once more appear pasque-
flower, moon, and tree? It’s lambing time,
but all is hushed outside, the crocuses huddled
like nuns awaiting the host, my heart alarmed
that tonight the unvoiced word will break its silence,
like a draft horse drag me back to the burning,
for God’s death, unbearable compassion,
now splinters through the woods, like a green fire
races over the fields, and into the far
north wings, high-up, fading from hearing.
Remember, I married Becky, your second daughter.
You don’t?
I remember the first time we met.
It was five years ago.
You ushered me into your den.
I thought you were going to ask me how much I earned
or did I love your daughter,
but instead, for each deer head mounted on the wall,
you had a story–
a blizzard, hands numb, icicles dripping from your hat,
you slogged through a marsh, slippery underfoot, one shot
and that buck with seven-pointed antlers dropped.
As for the next, you spent all day in the blind hungry, bothered by flies.
You started down, paused, climbed back up.
Moments later, a stag strutted from the woods.
Aiming low from above, you pierced its heart.
Then the dark cold came.
Seven more heads, seven more stories.
I saw you about to explode with laughter.
You took my arm and whispered, “Never believe a hunter.”
Gene, we’ve come for the auction.
I can see from your face
you remember your children if not their names,
but with me your face is blank.
I’m not hurt.
Each time we meet I get to be new again.
You loved deals.
You’d drive from Pennsylvania to Ohio,
jump from the car, and before greeting your kids and grandkids,
pull from the trunk an auger, a hand thresher,
really, a steal, you’d boast.
You’d stay the weekend, then off down the road.
You stopped milking years ago, more room in the barn for things.
Although you’ve sold the best, some treasures remain:
a Cloud electric lawnmower, one of seven made in the U. S.A.,
a wooden hay cart from the 1700's,
eighteen hand plows,
three wooden seeders,
two hand-cranked, sheep-shearing gadgets that work.
As for the rest, it’s “Gene’s Junque”:
buckets of hammers, hatchets, nails,
fifty long-handled shovels,
eight grind stones,
lumber, harnesses, weights, rocks, and more, and more.
By Friday night, all’s sorted, cleaned, and stacked,
the plows and wheels arranged in a great circle,
the rest piled on wagons inside the paddock fence.
All week, a hurricane’s been creeping up the coast,
but Saturday dawns foggy and bright.
We’re up at five, out at six, to park cars in the pasture.
At seven, no one but the auctioneers have come.
They say, “Maybe it’s the fog,”
but later we learn their signs sent folk half across Chester County.
By eight, there’s seventy people, more streaming in,
neighbors, relatives, junk dealers, buyers of scrap,
and a few, Gene, with your passion for tools
and the history of farming before the advent of power machines.
Off to the side, I see Earl, your hired man, dressed in his Sunday best.
He watches, smiles all day.
I go up and chat.
Earl’s pleasant, but what he thinks, per usual, I couldn’t guess.
He’s been eating dinners with your family
for fifty years, except Sundays,
off by himself at a side table with his own dishes and silverware–
that’s how it was, Blacks and Whites–
until a child, back from college, set him a place at the big table.
Now he eats at your right.
I don’t dare ask Earl, “What’s it going to be like for Gene tomorrow?”
All day, with few breaks, I help the auctioneers.
I am holding five augers over my head.
“Do I hear a bid at six, do I hear six, do I hear four...”
So it goes, a song so hypnotic
I’d buy if my hands weren’t full.
No bid.
“Add more,” the auctioneer says,
and I raise ten augers over my head.
“Do I hear…. Sold.”
I hold up weights.
“Sold.”
All day I’m lifting shovels, presses, grinders–
it must be the seller’s chant, for I don’t tire.
At a break, I talk with you.
“Great day. Everyone seems to know me. What a party,” you say.
You seem happy, and it is a great day,
the pieces selling so cheap it’s less an auction than a celebration,
Gene’s day, they’ll say for generations, a potlatch to remember.
The next day, Sunday, you poke around the barn,
seem pleased so much is gone.
We picnic under the tent,
and when a child comes late, you don’t complain
though nodding off by birthday cake.
Monday, I find you back inside the barn,
now seeming lost and listless.
I wonder if you miss your things.
A truck drives up. You brighten for a chat.
“Dad, we’re leaving,” we call, and you come over.
“Can’t you stay. It’s nice here.”
“Wish we could,” we answer.
“Ah, brother Tom.”
“No Dad,” says Tom. “I’m your son.”
It’s been a month.
We hear you’re up most nights at two ready for breakfast.
Betty gets you back to bed,
but an hour later, you’re up again.
“Who are you?” you ask.
“I’m Betty, your wife.”
“Ah, best thing I ever did was marry you.”
Your mind is empty, childlike, fresh,
but puzzled how to pull your trousers up.
You wander the house cheerfully,
then panic—is the barn door closed?—
insisting you’ve got to go out and check.
Gene, may you sleep all night
and find Betty tomorrow still your wife.
We’ll visit soon, we promise.
I’ve never seen a whippoorwill,
who sings so near somewhere,
and never seen an angel but
been brushed by passing air
that’s present as a rising tune,
which dies away when willed,
to resurrect at midnight
refusing to be stilled.
True, I have no proof of angels
but seen at death sparks go,
winged by invisibility
to flit above the snow.
You thought by looking back
that you could conquer pain,
believed that by redoing
you would yourself regain,
but the past, your dear familiar,
teased til you weren’t sane,
then ushered you to death.
Oh may you mercy gain.
“The dead and living surface, twist
and twirl through branches, sofas, chairs,
in mute parade down flooded streets...”
so I wrote and could not hear I was off-key,
remote from what had really happened
when the levees broke until,
at our writer’s group last night,
I heard friends’ poems of New Orleans.
Wind-driven rain, ghosting through the door,
lifted the latch to let the ocean in.
It crept across the floor,
bubbled up the windows, climbed the walls.
A clarinet on mantel drowned.
A couple, stork-like, stood on chairs.
A radio blared, “Drive north,”
lame without a car.
As waters rose,
the guards walked off, abandoning prisoners in their cells.
“Ain’t no telling now what happened there,”
said an inmate of brothers locked below.
X’d with orange chalk, corpses rotted in the streets.
Sheriffs blocked a bridge, allowed no black across,
while to the Super, or Rumor Dome,
relief came slow.
In every poem I heard our anger, shame,
and something fiercer far,
like we too got hit in the gut.
Though stunned, we read our poems, voiced our pain.
On walking home above the outstretched lake,
I thought to write this poem again with gathered voice,
increased respect for New Orleans
as bustling port and much loved home,
upon whose porches through the night jazz and Creole blent with scent of steaming gumbo,
where generations have remained,
by blood, not reason swayed.
Now plywood boards up mansions, shacks.
After such loss, I wonder if we’ll pitch in
or turn our backs,
visit Fat Tuesday, leave you the cross.
If once remote from me, you are no more.
I listen to the radio wondering what storm
will blow in next and where strike land.
The levees gone, skeletons ripple in the tide.
Where will your families go?
My guest room’s empty. Come in.
We’ll find something to say by the kitchen door.
It’s strange, you so near, like in heaven.
But cat, I’m no Christopher Smart.
Stop pestering me for a poem.
That you are fat and beautiful
is fact.
You’re a good mouser,
a snatcher, alas, of birds,
faithful in sharing your kills,
fastidious in your litter box,
mostly off by yourself
but when you’re hungry, yowling
as if there’s no tomorrow.
You’re right, there isn’t.
Your name Snookums
does not befit your dignity,
and when strangers coo,
“cute kitty, cute kitty,”
you arch your back
and strut away
unmindful of your belly’s
ponderous sway.
What more can I say?
You are my cat.
Listen, I’m reading you
this poem,
so don’t walk off
indifferent.
1.
What is God?
What isn’t?
2.
Silence fills the abbey
after vespers,
after the evening psalms,
while I’m outside shouting,
“Ralph, Ralph, where are you?
Come on out.”
3.
Don’t believe that I have turned from you
or Christ
or from the eternal church,
and don’t believe that I’m ungrateful
for your hospitality,
for breaking the bread of life with me,
and don’t believe,
though I support the law and want abortions safe,
that I believe they’re right.
I agree with you: there is a law beyond our law,
for I’ve seen death tread upon the heels of sin,
mercy rushing after.
4.
Once years ago,
you said, “Don’t love me
personally.”
To grasp your hand,
to look you in the eye,
to feel God’s presence in your heart—
that is the extent of my desire.
You are a person.
How can I love you or God impersonally?
5.
Meister Eckhart says,
we are as close to Christ
as to him who’s farthest from us.
I know,
I’m twisting your arm, Ralph,
but I want you close again.
6.
Born the same day of the year,
we have swapped cards—it would be for forty years
if you hadn’t stopped four years ago.
I miss your cards,
your poems,
your monk cartoons.
You’re still alive,
there over that height of land
and down the river six hundred miles.
Tell you what.
I’ll launch a plastic duck.
When it arrives, you’ll find this poem inside.
7.
It’s dry around Senanque. The monks have left
to crickets their song and to the sun their story.
What need has God for us, monk or married?
The crickets will sing, the sun blaze whether
or not the field is sown, the great stone abbey
built. Since God is perfect, He has no needs,
that is, as long as He keeps His distance from us,
but when He’s close, close as breath and conscious
of our every thought, each time we fail,
He falls with us—as love, suffers with us,
and needs the ladder of our brokenness
to climb back to His Glory. You are one rung,
I another. Let’s make it easy for God
and not remain, my friend, so far apart.
A man
terrified
at the top
of the stairs
cannot stop
going down into the dark.
The furnace shudders,
the drain seeps,
the barred windows darken
as he’s pulled
farther and
farther on
when,
centered between his eyes,
barely an inch ahead,
a speck
of the infinite
appears,
blazes,
sears,
destroys,
all in an instant
that lasts
forever.
On a bluff above Superior’s shore, we gather
in homely ceremony, bringing small gifts
and greater blessings to send you off a man.
Today is calm, but were it harsh would make
no difference. A hardiness is bred
into your bones, a blessing, winter coming
when you will be alone, stripped of us,
and have to face yourself, a bare sapling,
a leafless Leaf, past whom the crows will fly
and Saraswati, the essence of the self,
descend bearing from eternity
words empowered to shape a desperate age.
You’ll need a map: Beyond success lies failure,
truest of teachers; beyond belief doubt,
surveyor of illusion, and beyond doubt
truth that burns away the mind, but go
quickly before I gush like Polonius.
I have a book for you, this prayer as well:
Prospero, keep watch o’er Leaf and bring him
safe through shipwreck, spirit-tossed to find
this brave new world yet braver in his eyes.
You are here, and then you are gone
up in a tree, clad in chain mail
of your own making, surveying the earth,
watching, not thinking, absorbing the patterns,
letting go of judgments, a smile upon your face.
You don’t need to leave home to become wise.
You’ve gathered wisdom here, more than you know,
gathered a harvest of wholeness, like a Taoist,
carving without cutting, seeing in the block
the pattern, the shape of the grain, doing no harm.
Patrick charges. You step aside and let him fall
splat in the puddle, both of you laughing.
You remember our names. They come to you
before they glimmer into our minds.
Numbers puzzle you, ciphers of division,
while stories, stories meandering slowly, surely
towards their meaning, call to you, knitter
of chain mail, not as puzzles to be solved
but as patterns to be gathered in, the complex,
seen from above, simple for you.
So too is music. The melodies emerge
from your soul to resonate on well-tuned strings.
You play with passion but not in a hurry.
If a passage calls, you’ll linger there for hours
fingering, elaborating, reshaping the air.
You need no formal school or teacher,
but leaving home will serve you well,
to be affirmed, strengthened by others,
learn that you’re a leader, not one who cares
if followed but followed all the same.
Will you come back? Of course. Your heart
and family’s here, but if you’ll stay up north
or leave again, I cannot say, only that you’ll be
missed when bears knock at the door.
Like the trees, we will be empty without you.
A dew-chilled butterfly rose from a blade of grass
and fluttered down the path, then rose again as I
drew near. It was no monarch, no emperor, its wings
diaphanous, as if a chrysalis had taken
flight, or the molt of a snake were writhing down the path.
It flashed in black and orange cuneiform a message
I did not understand. A spangled fritillary,
mindlessly, it led me on along the path.
Although a sound will carry far across the snow,
I’d be mad to think a crane’s cry
could carry up from Florida and reach me here,
and yet I sense in the hollow crying,
for my heart is wrung,
my voice in answer wailing,
my soul drawn to the window,
a moth
fluttering against the brilliant, silent window.
Out there, Lord Meher’s crying.
*I Ching, Hexagram 61, Chung Fu, Inner Truth, line 2, Wilhelm translation.
Roots of a stunted pine
finger the cracked granite
where it slopes into the lake.
I too cling here,
summer-shadowed by hawks,
winter-scoured by owls,
winter, the season when the demon stars blaze,
snow falls, and I, crazed by darkness,
think about the Ancient One,
and no one comes,
no wandering master,
no prophet or magi,
no one
clothed in my desperate longing
comes, but who am I to sing of him?
Not Mirabai,
imagining she’s dust to his gold,
powder to make him shine,
not thrush or magpie, not even a gull,
mute as a beetle burrowing under a rock,
mute as the rock,
and yet,
having journeyed through countless ages
to reach my heart,
no one insists that I, no one,
speak of no one,
write of no one.
No one’s in no one’s hut.
The front door’s open.
Apple wood snaps in the stove.
A cock crows.
The cat purrs.
Come in.
Sit with no one,
the other side the fire.
The no one
you can name
is not no one.
The no one
you can fathom
is not no one.
Before the ten thousand things,
before words or names,
before the dream of absence,
what appears
is coming
to no one.
Seeking someone,
you miss
no one.
Missing no one,
you long
for no one.
By death’s mercy,
you will find
no one.
A bright darkness,
a voiced stillness,
a full emptiness—
there is no likeness to that.
Take no and thing from nothing,
no and one from no one,
what’s left? That.
No one is that.
No one is descended from no one.
And you?
And me?
In deepest sleep,
we return to no one.
No one
can find
no one’s hut.
Oil lamp,
wood stove,
hand-pumped well—
all around
is forest
and dreams.
The way out is clear,
dirt to gravel
to macadam,
but the way back
is remembered
by no one.
No one’s tracking number:
none.
A locked bathroom door,
such is the portal of dreams:
no one knows who will walk in.
The man racing the Harley,
the drive-in teller dressed to the nines,
the devotee emerging from the kaleidoscope of being
shattered into light are all
passing through the door,
dreamers dreaming their dreams,
but if the dreamer
dies in the dream,
no one wakes up.
“What I
want
today...
What I
must do
today...”
people think
going downstairs
for their morning coffee.
No one wants nothing,
seeks nothing,
does nothing.
No wonder bliss comes to no one.
No one sees a daffodil.
No one is stopped by a daffodil.
No one is illumined by a daffodil,
a daffodil by no one,
both by the not-two of light
becoming daffodil and no one.
When the Dalai Lama says,
“The purpose of life is happiness,”
others say, “Just so, just so.”
No one doubts the Dalai Lama’s words.
No one is happy without a purpose.
Words point.
Happiness
is pointless,
like the kindness
pouring
from the Dalai Lama’s heart.
No one sees no one in everyone.
To happiness and pain,
no one’s indifferent.
The committed hold signs and vigils.
No one doesn’t.
To sit in a hut waiting for peace and rain is silly,
but if peace and rain come to no one, what then?
No one values
an empty scale,
an empty mind,
an empty heart,
knowing what’s real
is light and tender,
a blossom fluttering,
a moth blown away.
No one yells through the gate,
“Don’t listen.
Go away. Get lost,”
while hoping
you’ll
come back
to find
no one
at home.
If you are on the way,
you will find
no one ahead of you
and no one behind.
Music is dear to no one,
but in her hut
there is no piano, flute, or oboe,
not even a recorder
but only silence
which no one plays.
A teacher catches a boy passing a note,
calls him up and makes him read,
“Kathy, I love you,”
then cracks his knuckles with a ruler.
No one remembers perfectly,
no one forgets completely,
no one forgives lovingly.
No one is free.
No one’s sent to prison,
his crimes:
forgetting name, citizenship, place and date of birth,
having no number,
wandering, begging, wearing rags,
lacking a creed,
taking life to be a dream.
The jailors are afraid of no one.
No one’s unafraid seeing they are no one.
When someone, he fretted
about what others were saying of him:
“A brilliant fellow,” “a hack, a sponge,”
and fretted about judging others the same,
but now he’s no one, he laughs,
for people don’t talk about no one,
and if he starts fretting, he stops
being no one.
No one is leaving the zendo now.
The chunk, chunk of his walking stick
follows the rhythm of his feet.
A monarch flutters in front of him,
the two of them going on forever.
No one is
lonely
for loneliness.
No one longs
for a stop
of being
a drop
in the fall
of fallingness,
to be
for an instant
separate and still,
and then
remembers
the pain of being someone
and is happy
once more
being no one.
Love is a wind
blowing through the heart,
a wind, not a breath—it can’t be held,
fierce, tender, rising, never stopping,
a bridegroom
holding no one aching with love.
No one, you are generous to me.
When I lose my way,
you whisper, “forget it.”
When I worry that you are gone,
you say, “of course.”
When I fear that I am just who I was,
you answer, “Who else?”
When I swell with something to say,
you prod, “Go ahead.”
When I burst out crying that I’m not you,
you’re back with, “How could you be?”
When I’m disconsolate,
“Not two,” you say, and so take me away.
In no one’s kingdom,
lord and beggar kneel
at the rail of light.
“My mother’s unhappy, my father drinks.
Arriving home for the holidays,
I’m given a hug, I’m given a beer.
‘Glad to see you,’ they say with cheer
as we settle down to the televised games.
Although their child, I’m no one to them.”
“Be no one then,” no one replies.
“The rain is falling, the sparrows chirp.”
The child in sorrow cries and cries.
No one says,
why polish the mirror?
No one’s there.
No one sits in a hut,
not a thought,
not a word,
not a poem coming to mind,
having forgotten about
peace
and rain.
Just then,
peace and rain come
to no one.
Shower a child with love,
creation flowers with delight.
Sever a child from love,
creation withers with despite,
and in this wealthy land of ours,
do children walk among the flowers
or waste in prison endless hours?
When hearts are bound by fears
and wars go on for years,
no one wipes the children’s tears.
I am no one.
“Who, who, who?”
the owl cries.
I am no one.
“Who, who, who?”
Owl, I am learning
the answer to
who times who.
“Who, who?”
I am chain saw
and silence,
tree upright
and tree upturned.
I am meteor
flaring, deer eyes
staring, moon,
raccoon.
“Who, who, who?”
Owl, I am you.
No one cleans out his desk, sweeps erasers,
packing tape, and paper clips into
the Goodwill box, crumples up old letters,
birthday cards, a tribute from a student,
tosses them into the trash, bubble-wraps
his mother’s porcelain mouse, his father’s silver
watch, drops them into the Goodwill box,
but when he comes across a fountain pen
from the fifth grade and a bottle of Quink Ink,
he pauses, fills the fountain pen, and writes.
His hand remembers the right pressure, the slight
irritating scratch of nib on paper,
then twists the pen ever so slightly until
the ink flows smoothly but not too fast, the how-to
stuck to his hand like pitch from the pine that shadowed
his childhood home, his refuge from chaos inside.
No one throws away the ink and pen,
then gazes at his hand. Cut it off,
throw it out? The mind remains. Who
can jump over his mind? No one, of course,
cleans out his desk while thinking of such things.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
To Joe Winter, for his encouraging and critical eye;
To Leah Johnston, whose imagination opened my poems to me;
To david carse, who realized, “There is no one here to awaken” (Perfect Brilliant Stillness, p. 47), his “no one” being the seed from which “The No One Poems” sprang;
To Becky, Paul, Sam, and many others for reading countless revisions;
And to Avatar Meher Baba, my Beloved, the One and No One;
My thanks for holding me steady, a moth flying into No One’s flame.