The way to Rainy Mountain is preeminently the history of an idea, man's idea of himself. . .
What remains is fragmentary: mythology, legend, lore, and hearsay—and of course the idea itself.
-N. Scott Momaday
1. A Billion Marriages in a Time of Desertification
Man of a billion marriages
abundant junctions
of distant endpoints
consummated, dissolved, archived
you are not childless
if to connect is to conceive
to list the numerable
& marvel at the less so
when a boiling-over pot of connections
proves the disparate only seems so
from effort’s lack
or memory lapse.
If you return often to a single image
-- an Alsike clover
or Birdsfoot trefoil trembling in the breeze
boot-flattened as mere crabgrass --
it is because you were planted here
to slow erosion
in a place of dwindling thirst
in a time of desertification.
.
2. The Idea Itself
The duty is a constructionist’s.
To reassemble fragments extruded
from something whole
by Hadrons of chaos
To see the picture in the picture
or disappearing frame,
cancer in the fetal cell
poisonous spider’s silk
To weigh love’s weightlessness
portent of its wanderlust ton
to see a hurricane’s ascent from Africa
as a long drought’s treacherous end
To collapse great distances
Wittgenstein to Verdi’s Requiem
to study disorientation deeply
to become lost in geologist canyons;
where some remind
or just rewind
you hypothesize revise
classify objectify
so as not to underestimate
the ornate
so as not to embellish
the naked.
3. Scenes from a Hitchcock Interpreter
Mint-green sky through the jacaranda
where he had planned to tell her she was beautiful
& that criminal justice reform could only be found
in screenplays of early Hitchcock . . .
Best ones don’t make it to screen
He remade her as odalisque
despite the dailies
to surface a dying Madame Curie’s ingénue
explaining all the while
it need not be your eye at the eyepiece
that canvas is after all
also for luggage, tarpaulins & sails.
That monasteries closed before they could be shot
foretold disappearance of the luminous
so that now it takes a certain Nordic
-- which is to say cold – sensibility;
when Orson Wells shared your kitchen
Mercury Theatre players crowded in your flat
turned hearsay & dramatic hesitation
into panoramas of unfilmed loss,
mourned poets playwrights
exquisite sex traders lost to AIDS
with your jeweler’s appreciation
for retrovirus guile.
4. A Fashion of Countersigns
Your cultivars of flora are countersigns --
upas groves & air-breathing water lilies --
a stern epicure’s Götterfunken!
marooned on a carnivorous planet,
your voiceovers
alternately declaim & murmur
a kaiyu-shiki of place character event
in which fiction slithers offstage.
To speak of riches on the path to Rainy Mountain
even if what is craved remains
folded & motionless beneath a central fissure
is the honorable certiorari you don
Orson’s clown tunic
or commoner cerement:
discernible fashion
in a sparkling sea of dispersion.
9 May 2012
for Brian