In lucid intervals of memory
recalling:
2
that
one recalls (not knowing all)
yonder outline and asks it:
why
are you not black
like a sketch in India ink
or charcoal?
There, in that
place,
there is a sense of someone
there.
There is a map or chart.
There is a recipe for reconstruction.
There is a sign,
1
in
the sacred air between seeing and seen,
with presque vu he
searches for and is searched,
with the tip of the tongue--maiden
middlehood.
Where? How far away in time or space?
How? Where the mode of knowing what
one cannot immediately find is waiting
in the wings of
3
waiting
like an icicle or falling oak?
How old is oneness
lost not so long ago,
the loss then lost as well & all
returned,
all made good?
Loss is the smell
of sweat in mountain lairs,
lost is the stage play of terraced rock
and cliff,
lost are the ghosts of tribes who no
longer exist.
Did I ever tell you about Bandelier
among
the antlers where I wrapped
rawhide around a stick with bells and
feathers
and set it in the shrine?
"One
deer", it said, "yours or mine,
for one or both of you."
It
was an electromagnetic wave of impersonal reward:
"You
are welcome here for you have respected us."
And there
in this between: "But only for a time."
And next
morning we walked down the trail to the pueblos
seen across the
pink canyon below--
4
as
in four square,
as
in the ancient Chinese ZHONG,
中
which
is a place with a banner
raised
to sky and burrowing into earth,
dead
center, the KAIROS
which
exists anywhere in time,
backwards
and forwards.
I thought she read minds.
I
thought she read my mind.
I thought she saw and smelled
the vast eons around us—inhaled
them with her eyes.
I thought
she saw the spirits--
men women and happy children
around one smokepole as if
they left the light on for us,
waiting.
The deer came years later.
It was a confused and naive buck.
He got it through the heart
close-up with a 12 gauge slug.
It gasped and fell.
He skinned and butchered it.
It was venison for one winter.
He knew then there was only the one,
yours or mine, for one or both of us.
E. A. Costa 25 September, 2015 Granada, Nicaragua
