The Things of Nature

And up from the ocean stream

And down from heaven far

The rays that blend in dream

The abysm and the star.

 

                        Herman Melville, “The Haglets”

 

 

We were born apart in blood and tears

Gasping for a name, a word, a sign

 

Blinking back at us from passing stars

To light a path back to the dark earth

Slowly crawling over itself, folding

 

Over the fire at the heart of all things,

This world the womb and tomb of time

A mind measures as it becomes one

And not another—something of the sea

Coughed out of cold depths, impossible

 

Anywhere else, and even here unlikely,

Unloved, unable to do much but be beautiful

And patient for a while: coming together

In so many separate currents, thrashing

Toward a moment of silence and resolve

Naked in its implacable grief, that none

Should follow without knowing no one

 

Lasts alone for long; one sip, wet lips

Staining the skin with quivering cold,

Until a hand reaches out for rescue

And grasps at rain in rage and desperation

For some angelic alter ego, a puppet perhaps

But no less divine than real, however private

That must remain behind the veil of phonemes

Spit from the twisted instructions cased

In flesh—to be content in this condition,

 

To know it means nothing but its making,

Missing where memory leaves a darker mark.          

 

Gary Keenan lives in Tunia, Cauca, a village of eighteen hundred in the Colombian Andes. His poems have been published in the United States, Ireland, England, Denmark, Germany, India and Australia since 1979. His book Rotary Devotion won the 2016 Poets Out Loud Award and is available from Fordham University Press.