THE WATCHING HILLS
a body, still fairly young, on a blanket,
motionless under the mobile stars,
as the chill in stalks of coarse grass,
trout lily, and jewelweed
settles on hemlocks mantling these hills
near ledge shelters and open caves.
We have been conditioned by horror films
to panic at bodies sprawled on the ground,
and the documentary photos displayed
of a battle-zone field station
before the casualties were removed
to base camp for quick autopsies,
the thoracic Y's, sliced and sewn,
from shoulder blades to pubic bone,
and the body bags hosed down.
Or the crime stories on cable stations
showing the morgue, like a food locker,
its dead bloated from floating days
in a murky, junk-congested lake,
with a penis shrunk to a mushroom cap
and furrows lining cheeks and thighs.
And liberal viewers can't look away.
The body, no longer heroic and lovely,
even when wounded, as once in art,
has buried the feeling that springs from grief,
a quick blossom that wilts to grief.
Once a little less than the angels,
it returns to the soil, but only the soil,
no longer the hostage against surrender,
like the raft of corpses, lashed as planks --
the deadly remains of a royal flagship
steered by grinning cannibals --
that could fire the passion of revolution.
But this is macabre, romantic drama.
See, the body we watched is moving,
attaching itself to a sleeping partner,
as we step back in the watching hills.
A Painted Field in Ohio
A local artist used strokes
of color across a canvas,
in an image to fix in place
the landscape and sky,
looking "East of Gambier",
as a way to help to preserve
the picture in our minds,
the one that will never
be seen by anyone else.
Let us foresee an airy tide
of crows, like black stars, yawl
in the updraft over trees,
tacking and turning at angles
into and out of hidden winds
and over the flat water,
reflecting the sky ascending,
in broad layers of clouds,
shadowing the ready fields.
And whatever things we see
start to become objects
bearing light, reaching
out to the ridges of dark air
clotting around cloud scrolls..
Streaks of sun-lines,
condensed, have picked out
the rutted, tumbling lanes
of mud, bricking the roadways
through the low line of hills
Just a few miles north
where the glaciers moved
and then retreated, tract by tract,
subsequent floods brooded
over upturned stone basins,
and then receded in time.
The last traces of moisture
ascended into the looming clouds.
And here the other living things,
plants and small spores,
rose and sank, over and over,
leaving deposits like a script
we still attempt to decipher.
And now the painter's hand
gives us ample clues about
that long and wordless message.
DREAMS MAY COME
There is no real escape in sleep
as the doors close on the dayworld
and the house, its corridors of rooms,
and the yard outside grow awake.
Waiting outside on this quiet street
between the trimmed-hedge enclosures
on each stifling summer night
were eyes, staring like radiant stars.
In bed in the unfinished atic
I followed an interlocking maze,
and moved slowly, much too slowly,
from soldiers and strangers sent to hurt,
or missed a train or ship by seconds,
or felt trapped in a narrowing tunnel.
My conversations with the dead,
familiar as when they lived with us,
began and stopped, as we changed places.
I was departed, while they still lived.
Mostly I lay still, expecting
something to happen, to see a face
fill the open, inviting window.
And one, long, endless night
a gruesome monster glared back,
its whole body convulsed in horror
at what it saw alive in my room.
HOPE
It began long before the present,
before the documentaries
and repetitive legislative reports.
When bison were shot in their wallows,
when artists lamented the carrier pigeons,
or the final Dodo died alone.
Before rare and common species
in a vast Trimalchio's feast
were killed for feathers, hides, or horn.
The apocalyptic talk today
of global change by fire or ice
has kicked around and around for aeons.
The skillfully hidden number of deaths
we store in print-outs, in statistics,
dull us looking backwards or ahead.
The Darwinian struggle to crown a victor
failed. And there is no forgiveness,
as each thread is pulled from the web.
The after-effects of our suicide
attempts have reached a sum
that dealt this hand: Aces and Eights.
Termites, with billions of eggs, will live
until the cremated remains of forests
cover their cast-off wings with ash.
And the god of reverse creation
will withdraw the roiling oceans of fish,
the creatures on land, and all birds,
after the trace of humans is gone
and the waterless planet cracks
from air condensed with colorful poisons.
And the sun and the moon are no more,
and the stars in domino-effect
sputter once and cease to shine.
And light collapses into itself,
the size of a pin and then vanishes;
and words choke in this god's mouth.
A PRISONER OF HOPE
I strangely find myself
a prisoner of hope, not
on a seven-storey mountain
but in the once familiar
village where I circle
in the ways I once had known.
Silence now is taken as
infinite in license and protection,
leaving rescue in some
other willing hands.
Avoid the crime of witness
of the occupying forces
that threaten an investigation
where I may now become the
voice of my own prosecution.
Should each onlooker,
safely distanced,
report themselves to
the authorities in masks
as co-conspirators
with those they will arrest?
The land that once had meant
escape became the country
many wanted to escape from,
a circuitous exchange we made
in anguishing itineraries.
We claim we did not see the
shift to panic after plain denial,
as we became the foreigners
within our very midst.
Poetry must now be read
as if a transit visa,
aiding us across some border,
if any safe one still exists,
that would, at least, be open
to our smuggled hope.
History, we know, repeats
itself. But always worse
in all the bloody commerce
of failure to escape.
Throngs I see upon a
lonesome road
carry only
shadows of their
inner lives to find
an earthly paradise
now gone.
Royal Rhodes taught classes in global religions for almost forty years. He has always had a love for poetry in various forms and languages. His interests have also been shaped by the study of ritual in ancient cultures. He lives in a small village that is close to a nature conservancy and green cemetery.
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