Greek stones look as though
they’d flowed
into molds of figures, fluting,
leaf forms, scrolls,
a sensed and sensible world
turned stony-hard
and durable, medusaed to hold and
be true,
as figure carving holds an
impress pressed
on the carver’s eye by a visible
form whose grace
and harmony his hand lays hold
and holds.
This way of handling stone is to
say of the world
it is workable, and yielding and
full to the hand;
and their quarrying quarried a
rich world.
Looking at stones the Incas laid,
abstract
austerities, unimitative stones,
so self-absorbed in their
unmortared, close
accommodation, stone to different
stone,
exactly interlocked, deep joined,
we see them say of the world
there is nothing to say.
Who had to spend such easing care
on stone
found grace inherent more as idea
than in
the world, loved simple soundness
in a just joint,
and the pieces together once
though elsewhere apart.
"Tenochtitlan"
I did not go to Coatlicue today,
to her of the writhing skirt of
serpents, skulls
suspended at her neck, clawed
Mother of the Gods.
Not that it mattered: if we have
learned at all,
we have learned not to deny the
terrible ones
their due; they have it; we are
theirs to keep.
But we also learn—not knowing is
it fear
or defiance teaching us—not to
think
of everything always, sometimes
not to think.
Xilonen, Goddess of the Young
Corn, of green
and growing, grant us the solace
of sweet ears
soft in the mouth; accept our
truant love.
We drink to you, Xilonen, we are
drunk
with deep pleasures and a deep
need, drunk
with gentleness and the pleasure
of gentle needs.
"In Navaho Country"
To live in a hogan under a
hovering sky
is to live in a universe
hogan-shaped,
or having hogans in it to give it
shape,
earth-covered hovels, holes
having a wall
to heave the back of the heart
against, or hide
the head, to black the heavens
overhead,
a block and a shapening in the
windy vast.
This could be said of other
houses too.
How it is possible for this to be
so
is that the universe as
known-unknown
has no discernible shape and not
much
in it. We give it the limits and
shape we need
it to have. What we want is a here with meaning, more
than a vague void moving with
weightless balls
or the distant view of a glitter
of gritty dust.
We housel the universe to have it
here.
We do wrong: using houses or
whole
blocks of houses, or other
devious
enclosed volumes, ingenious
inventions of space
to have us here, has limits. We
deceive
ourselves, but not for long. We
only avoid
the empty vastness, leaving it
there unfilled,
unknown, unlimited. Where is here
when nowhere in a place of
discernible shape?
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