Wisp of Will

Wisp of Will

            …how far the theories have gone

to suggest what these bright appearances

portend in the eye of the mind where we know

from the beginning that the darkness

is beyond us there is no explaining

the dark it is only the light

that we keep feeling a need to account for

                                    “The Marfa Lights”

                                    W. S. Merwin

I’ve never been that far south-

west.  We went straight down
from Boulder to Amarillo,

and then straight across

to the Grand Canyon.

Or straight is how it felt

at the time, as though we had

tunnel vision. 

And even so

it was a long time ago

and with another man and when

I’m remembering, sure, it’s a

light, a burn and a fist, a match

continuously lit and snuffed

on the soft of the inside

of the thigh, or, metaphorically,

the wet cheek beside the ground

down teeth.  It’s the bit part

healing over and over, the way

a Greek god surrenders his liver

or another, married

to his stone, pushes and pauses all the way

to a top he never sees only to watch 

(maybe sometimes he doesn’t watch)

it let go of him and roll and roll

and roll away.  The bottom

is there, only from where he stands

the clouds won’t allow it.  I want

Sisyphus to be a woman, or a cross

dresser at least, maybe a trans-

vestite, or better still, hermaphrodite.

Because watching that stone

is so much like marrying without

balls or imagination, without so much

as a sigh or a shrug after a while,

its stepping down again, every day,

toward alight that's almost always

dark.  

But see (now that’s

funny, because who does) knowing is

eyes on the soles of the feet,

a knowing our eyes in our head

rejects, fools us about.  My feet knew

more about his knuckle and fist

and what he’d force into the tight

dry spaces than my eye did.  The feet saw

it coming.  And I walked them down

anyway, into his seductive cuffs.

                        This isn’t supposed

to be about that.  It’s supposed to be

about little lights that come up out

of the ground, lights the poet saw

and wrote about, lights that glow

against the quilt of black, glow and float

or maybe just hover the way choices

hover.  When we see them, when we let

our feet, without socks or shoes,

come back to us from where they've been

without us, even though we’re attached

(like I was when I walked down

that patch of grass that was a marriage

aisle--legs and torso, arms and head,

we went through all the I do’s…)

and something pinched my feet.  

The shoes were too tight.  And after that

they’d throb when I woke up

after a complicated negotiation

with him.  Pads on fire.  Heels turned

to crust.  They’d feel as though they’d

been stalked,  they’d slip by in the dark

after he’d go by as though he were parted

air, the way they wanted to the first time

but I had those tight shoes on

and the sun was in my face.

And I was too far west

and the stars on earth only floated

like will-o-the-wisps, and I wasn't smart

enough to know that what was 

happening was happening.  I just 

followed the stone.