Jorie Graham (American, 1950 - )
"The Age of Reason" (from Erosion, 1983)
1.
The anxious bird in the wild
spring green
is anting, which means,
in my orchard
he has opened his wings
over a furious
anthill and will take up
into the delicate
ridges of quince-yellow
feathers
a number of tiny, angry
creatures
that will inhabit him, bewildered
no doubt,
traveling deep
into the air
on this feathery planet,
new life
We don't know why
they do it.
At times they'll take on
almost anything
that burns, spreading
their wings
over coals, over cigarette
butts,
even, mistakenly, on bits
of broken glass.
Meanwhile the light keeps
stroking them
as if it were love. The garden
continues its work
all round them, the gradual
openings that stand
for death. Under the plastic
groundcover the human
garden grows: help-sticks
and knots, row
after row. Who wouldn't want
to take
into the self
something that burns
or cuts, or wanders
lost
over the body?
2.
At the end of Werner Herzog's
Woyzek,
after the hero whom
we love
who is mad has
murdered
the world, the young
woman
who is his wife,
and loved her,
and covered himself
with blood,
he grows frightened
by how quickly
she softens and takes on the shape
of the soil.
In the moonlight he throws
his knife
into the wide river
flowing beside them
but doesnt think it has
reached deep
enough so goes in
after it
himself. White as a knife,
he goes in after it
completely. The trees are green.
The earth
is green. The light
is sick
with green. Now that
he's gone
the woman is a tiny
gap
in green. Next day,
in slow
motion, the undertakers and
philosophers
(it is the Age of
Reason)
wander through the tall
and glossy
ferns and grasses
looking for
the instrument. It's spring.
The air is
gold. Every now and then
they lift
the white sheet they have
laid to see
what death is. They are
meticulous,
the day is everything
they have.
3.
How far is true
enough?
How far into the
Earth
can vision go and
still be
love? Isn't the
honesty
of things where they
resist,
where only the wind
can bend them
back, the real weather,
not our
desire hissing Tell me
your parts
that I may understand
your body,
your story. Which is why
we have
characters and the knife
of a plot
to wade through this
current. Now
it's blossoms
back to back
through the orchard.
A surf
of tenderness. There is
no deep
enough. For what we want
to take
inside of us, whole orchard,
color,
name, scent, symbol, raw
pale
blossoms, wet black
arms there is
no deep enough.
- - - -
Jorie Graham was born in New York City in 1950. She attended New York University as an undergraduate and received an MFA from the University of Iowa. She is the author of numerous collections of poetry and recipient of numerous awards, including the 1996 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1994.
