First Sailor
With
oars and flying cloths
he
darkens, like a mindless dye,
the
ocean’s size and meaning.
He
speaks the swerve of newness.
The
squeak of wheel and wood,
the
loud and crooked water.
His
round eye, like the circling stars,
touches
every dark. His mark
moves
on the water like a tiger.
He blunders on the windy sea god
who rattles the sky with glowing rain
and the little black leaf of his eye.
One
future pauses like an animal
and
passes by, twists the dark and light
on a roar and a triangular horn.
The
Three Weird Sisters Speak to MacBeth
Moon strews
shadow on the field,
and
a silver stillness. And we sisters,
casting
light. Light that falls unequally
and makes the spaces flower differently.
Light
is near us like a skin of heat or insects.
We
move the shadows like a lifted lamp.
We are mirror, we are bright, we wield
the
color of winter. And we are always right.
What
we prophesy must fasten to a place.
So
show us your burning unsaid thoughts.
Show
us with your writhing eye
the
hole where you hide your wishes.
Even
now they rustle, quicken
beside
your words like a little wind.
We
want to touch them with our fingers.
Then
we’ll go, like the shifting of a shadow.
Walk
on our icy voweling
like
the white stones in a garden.
Follow
the cold if all the light is gone.
Your
wishes strengthen the illusion.
We
will take you
where
you want to go.
Mark
the sky like a moon.
with
your radiant, damning act.
MacBeth
i.
The
women opened the silver mirror:
A
seeming stillness filled with moon
and
a pulse of light. A little sea that
rose
to touch me with floating things.
It
fingered my thoughts with images,
the
riddle of what I might do. Violence
glowed
in the seams of it. A slyness
of
witches, part gleam, part murder.
ii.
I
glided into the dark as if in a sleep,
drifting
among the floes of light, the awful subtleties.
Dream
and wakefulness repeated the wishes
they
brought me, wringing me like a mutable cloth.
It
seemed to question me, as women do, to prod.
I
knew that the words for yes were “advance”
and
“kill.” That the path was weeping
a
light I didn’t understand.
iii.
I
grew bold on the water that holds all blessings
The
water went faster, deeper,
like
a kind of forgiveness,
a
fever of high-sounding words.
I
think I rode the fire-colored river
as
a soldier might, holding its dangers to me
with
the motions of my hands. I killed quietly,
quickly,
apart from the jabber of witches.
iv.
I
was made for a soldier’s death—a thing of the body
made
with rules and loud, simple words.
The
women made me want those other things,
they
who seem to own the change from light to dark.
A glowing moon that will sink and rise
and
sink again and show you your soul.
Oh,
if the light of bravery ever loved me,
why
did it send me here?
Patricia Nelson is a former attorney who writes in the
"Activist" tradition, a movement started by Lawrence Hart in the
1930s. Not a political movement, but an effort to fully occupy the poetic
territory opened up by the Modernists.
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