Let us go down, and there confound
Gen 11:7
We entered you like a body,
through darker ground where a memory
of water ran, following the white of little bells,
or the backside of a hare. Living in the language
of something else, the bird’s nest
orchid, whose food is not its own, whose leaves
are its stalk, whose roots copy the house
of a bird, reminds me of us – beige-brown and unable
to synthesize the light. It deals with the living as we do –
in pale-faced fear, and (fingering its leaves) my daughter asks
that we tread more softly – we’re waking it up she says,
meaning you, or something in our feet and legs.
We enter you, and you offer up your past
and future like a box of chocolates: a mint-blue
egg shell, the gleaming thigh bone
of a deer, an old trunk pierced with shoots
we walk through as through layers of time.
Sometimes a screech breaks in – a line of birches
pulling the silver thread of the high speed train.
On the edge of you live men who speak
as you do – my daughter worries for the mare
as flies skate on her eye, but the potter says
they like to drink her tears, in the same tone
I’ve heard him say before what we call pests
are eating his young tree, because the tender wood
tastes good to them. Outside his hut, we find by the river
an old clay goddess with a cracked back –
his children have stuffed it with red earth
and tufts of grass like a closed flowerpot and she kneels
in the mud, blue-grey like the river bed.
Hens come to peck her, sheep rub against her face.
Because of the crack, she is oddly poised,
like bracing, or turning at great cost; all over her
the crazed, starry glitter of powdered glass.
We kneel and cup our hands, and wash her hair
as I did years ago for the old village woman.
We’ll bring something back
from the woods today; a word or two.
We use language to wake up silent things. Or let them lie.