Free Holy Heathen Rhapsody by Pattiann Rogers Page A

its green currents,
    the spool of the sun in its dawning.
    It could easily be a shawl of light
    placed around a woman’s shoulders
    as she rests beneath a mimosa,
    unaware of a seed drifting high
    above her on the green undersurface
    sky of July. See how the green fronds
    of the rain unfurl, spooling away
    in the ocean’s current. Look again.
    A crack appears across the universe
    of a buoyant pod. The first throb
    of the seed’s green fire is dawning.

THE BODY ENTIRE
    Once I saw a field of bluebonnets and fiery
    paintbrush so solid with flowers it seemed
    to be a surf and sea crests across which a ship
    might sail petal by petal like a shadow passing
    across an otherwise unbroken evening.
    And I was the field, blue crests, stem
    fire and surf. I was the shadow ship.
    I was the evening passing. Everything
    there in those moments was as inseparable
    as the rhythm of the sea is inseparable
    from the words of an old chanty sung
    long ago by seamen inseparable
    from a time no one now remembers.
    At the shallow edge of a pond, I watched
    an underwater nest of floating jelly-pod eggs,
    a translucent, swayable heaven holding a thousand
    eyes, bold dots of black, all seeing with one
    flawless sight, and I was their vision.
    I remember flying a summer migration,
    each of us the flock indivisible, headed north
    to breeding grounds. Paradise: our silver
    feathered bodies, hearts and bones, solely
    identical, all separate calls one single
    sound emphatic. Our open wings were
    the wheel and purpose of the sky turning
    the earth exactly like the stars do.
    That leaf indistinguishable—or that one
    or that one, each magnificently anonymous—
    is bound as an entire mountainside of autumn
    aspen. Each yellow spinning is the piece
    and the whole of the standing forest—alone,
    unique, synonymous—moving with the Moving
    that moves the aspen-altered wind and me.

HAIL, SPIRIT
    A weaver, this spider, she plays her eight thin
    black legs and their needle nail toes across
    the threads faster, more precisely, than a harpist
    at concert can pluck the strings in pizzicato.
    Although blind at night, she nevertheless
    fastens a thread to a branch of chokecherry
    on one side of the path, links it to a limb
    of shining sumac opposite, latches the scaffold
    to ground stone and brace of rooted grasses.
    And the structure takes dimension.
    Skittering upside down across and around,
    she hooks the hooks, knots the widening
    spirals, the tightened radii, orbs and hubs,
    bridges and bridgeheads. We can never hear
    the music she makes as she plucks her silk
    strings with all the toes and spurs and tarsal
    tufts of her eight legs at once. She performs
    the reading of her soul.
    Oh, remember how vital her eyes, the eyes
    of her gut, eyes of her touch gauging the tension,
    her eyes of gravity and balance, of purpose,
    steady eyes of reckoning. Don’t miss
    the moment when she drops, a quick grasp,
    catches, swings forward again. An artiste.
    She expands the sky, her completed grid
    a gamble, a ploy played on the night. The silk
    is still, translucent and aerial, hanging in a glint
    of half-moon. The work is her heart strung
    on its tethers, ravenous, abiding.



SCARLATTI SONATA TESTAMENT
    Listen . . . all white foxes, all white owls, all snowy
    silver geese. Attend . . . all casual fish holding on
    in the icy beads of a silver current. Snow leopards,
    white bears, silver baboons, mottled white mice nosing
    at autumn seeds . . . pause in unison, lift your heads.
    Still your wings and heed . . . silvery blue moths fluttering
    like flakes of moon. Long-haired, spike-horned goats
    on precipitous cliffs, white spiderlings floating
    mid-cloud . . . take note and remember.
Each barb
    of every feather, every black-tipped ivory hair, every
    luminous scale and fan-like fin, each knuckle of spine
    and nail, each red drop at the pith of the marrow,
    at the root of all glare and mettle,
every breath