the poetrysheet
whimsy, subversion, bowling
Number 450, Jan. 6, 2004
Mihály Babits (1883-1941)
“It’s a curious aspect of
lying—looking at the phenomenon philosophically—that for most people the size
of a lie has no relation to its perceived potency. Some people cannot
distinguish between small lies and large lies; for them, the act of lying is
always itself an enormity, and comes in
only one size. God did the same in Eden. Adam’s sin was actually very small,
but God inflated its consequences ridiculously.”
—James Wood, The Book Against God
Upon the discovery of Paradise, the child
ceases to fear
When he stumbled on the valley, Jack had entered a world
he knew he’d never leave. He had heard of it and had played at its edge for
almost a week, but hadn’t thought much of it until he’d run into a deep,
cedar-strewn notch in the earth’s surface.
The ravine was dry, an arid, rocky cleft in the humid
forest where the oak and walnut wouldn’t grow. He followed it down, stopping
occasionally to watch a skink or collared lizard jump over the edge of a stone
or race along a rock ledge. Toward the bottom, walking became harder as it
widened out and spilled back into the shaded forest in a tumble of rock and
seeping moss and armies of jack-in-the-pulpit.
But once on flattish ground again, he stopped and
looked up toward the seam of rock he had climbed though. To him it seemed a
mighty jaw cut in the woods, a mouth that opened to the clear sky, which he
hadn’t seen but through tree branches in days. He lifted his chin and yawped
once just to hear himself, and behind him his voice echoed under the cathedral
of trees and empty forest floor. A squirrel rustled through leaf bed and
mayapple.
He continued on to the bottom of the valley, and
there saw the river he had dreamed about so often. The men had told him was not
deep or wide, but insistent, having carved the entire valley out of raw
limestone. Its water was muddy and warm in summer, clear and cold in fall,
frozen solid in winter, and green in spring. In its dark reaches, they said,
beside the normal giant man-swallowing blue catfish, lived fishes with thick
submarine bodies and noses like long-handled wooden spoons. Eyeless crawdads
and salamanders crawled the caves at its banks, and buzzards flocked its
floodplains in all seasons.
His boots in the grass at the bank, he stood in the
warm, brothy water to his ankles. The sky opened above and the floodplain on
the other side of the river reached for miles to the bluffs. He could hear no
sound but the water at his ankles and his breath in his ears. He stood,
mesmerized by the water and the sky and the sun until dusk, when a breeze
lifted at the far end of the valley and brought the smell of campfires to him.
In the twilight, he witnessed wonders. An oxbow, now
overgrown with vines and swampy, and thick with broken ash and sycamore. A
cottonwood grove dark as night where mature trees only as wide as saplings grew
nearly a hundred feet tall grew and so close he could barely wedge himself
through. Pygmy rattlers laid up on gravel bars of intermittent streams like
stray bits of cable. Trees along the valley walls set like arms bent at the
elbow that he knew to have been trained that way by the Osage to point out
trails and springs.
When Jack came back to camp, the father in charge was
angry, having missed the boy dearly and been worried about him all day. Jack
took the man’s admonitions with complete attentiveness but without guilt. He
sat with the other boys around the campfire and ate his stew in silence. Later
he watched the fire but didn’t hear the stories. When it was time for bed, he
didn’t sleep, but instead stood at the door of his tent and listened to the
forest, hearing it for the first time.
Near midnight, a luna moth flew across the camp, silver in the moonlight. It’s shadow fluttered across the corrugated roof of the cabin where the men slept and fell to the jasper-strewn ground. Soundlessly, it moved through the camp with a slow beat of its giant wings. When it drifted over Jack, he saw it turn emerald as it eclipsed the moon. He knew, as he watched the moon reappear, he had witnessed his creation.
Today’s poem:
a raindrop on the humus,
through the soil,
down into the fossils
on a cave roof
a vast lake
flows out of a rock seam,
pure, clear, cold
the twelve-year-old’s hands
make a cup
for the sweetest memory
he’ll ever taste
the daydream
of an old man
on a porch swing
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