Nicholas Samaras
Hours: Retreat Center
I
Who owns this voice?
II
Old, hoary patriarch,
he said.
Cradle of tenderness, a man holds
a boy’s face
in the parchment of his hands.
The boy kisses his father, and sleeps.
III
Father, spread the black wings
of your rasso
and cover us.
IV
We are tired, voices call.
We are tired and still
we want.
Who owns this cry?
Lone voice.
V
There must be a land of celibate rifles.
VI
We cry to have salt in us.
It remains true:
We cry for peace but there is no peace.
There are only
outbreaks of neutrality in the long history of the one enduring war.
Until all we can do
is to take the war into ourselves,
to battle in retreat.
What is the name of a place
where retreat is victory?
VII
I remember:
peace is not just
the absence of war.
There was a wilderness in a large city,
where each street led into itself.
In this place, we ate
our fill of each other, our tedious desires,
and there was speech that was no speech.
Our eyes looked down.
Our own clothes choked us.
It is the wrong city when you cannot tell which city it is.
VIII
I have gathered these hours for years.
I have gathered the years.
IX
Tear me from this century.
Let what is ancient
save us in our modern plight,
where sincerity is artifice excelled.
X
Are we finally too sophisticated for God?
Who can say, Religion, and not be laughed at?
It is the dead who roll their eyes.
XI
I am tired of the surface.
I have spent
winters with the effort
and now turn on a hinged season,
look to the old to make me young.
I admit a passion for God.
I extol a passion for something
other than myself, finally
other than myself.
Tomorrow, I will yearn
for something ancient.
I will speak the name.
XII
In the approach of winter,
flee your life.
XIII
I tack in the wake of time:
the anniversary of the season I came to this place
with my Slovakian brother;
the time of my father . . .
his time and mine, to create
our one entity.
I drive, your body
beside me forever.
XIV
Past
and the streets named after armaments,
past
where is the true, original
meaning of this word
and who in history has disowned it?
We drive, and a road is a voyage.
XV
Steering away from
there are the hives of missile silos buried
in the dormant hills.
A country takes its most beautiful land
and stockpiles the weaponry underground.
But the face is chained off from trespass
and the road swells to its rise,
past the caterpillar tracks of heavy machinery
wind does not erase,
on dust roads splintering off,
descending
out of sight and forethought.
XVI
Make a prayer for the hollow earth beneath us.
XVII
We come like impoverished philanthropists,
arrive in a darkness that takes everything.
There is memory ahead of us.
XVIII
The lightless cabin opens to our fumbling.
Through our immediate sleep,
a long train’s moan rumbles
mournful, long.
XIX
Filtered light.
What hour?
We buried our watches in clothes we would not wear in this place.
The lack of noise wakes us.
XX
The first, faint ashes of snow eddy the air.
A winter-haired man walks over the close of a field.
The late cord grasses, calf-high.
A white loon drifts onto the blue mirror of
Its one cry ripples out.
The evergreens are wet with frostcoat,
the thinnest, fragile ice.
Other trees reach their arms
up to a paternal sky,
the high, last flailing of geese.
XXI
Grey boulders move
themselves in wilderness.
Clustered hives of pinecones balance in branches.
Shimmer of fogshawl.
The white linen of air.
XXII
The elder went to where he was
a stranger to his own life.
It felt new, and good.
He moved his mouth to no one.
XXIII
Our season unhinges. The afternoon chills. The fireplace remembers.
XXIV
His salt and pepper hair, his long platinum hair, his white hair.
His hair the color of woodsmoke.
A halo
spread on the pillow.
XXV
The broad arms
that held you in warm robes.
The only times in your life
you have ever felt
safe.
XXVI
The hollow earth. A want of filling.
XXVII
Against the gathered dusk,
I watch the outline of a darker, small mass—
the elder walking to the empty chapel.
Then, nothing. Then,
from inside that quiet house,
a rind of light bobbing
toward the eastern side:
a gold votive glow moving
from window through sleeping
window.
A golden hand holding it.
XXVIII
I wait for hours to pass, staying up
long enough to watch the red light flicker out
and the chapel door open to deep indigo air.
Gold flakes of lightning in the black far off.
XXIX
From this window,
through the thicket of trees,
I see scraps of campfire scrape the darkness.
The outline of the old man stretches upward,
his form gives shape to the darkness, harvest the light.
I imagine the circle of stones, burning like my life.
XXX
Inside, I crumple newspapers.
We watch the one channel of the fireplace,
ballet of flame.
We step outside for the holy smell of woodsmoke
that is our private incense rising
pungent and woolly.
XXXI
Your body moves the evening air aside
as you walk the chaparral, inhaling pinesmell,
and the air is altered by your voyage.
You become wind.
You become
everything you have ever let go.
XXXII
To give up speech between each other
and learn a vocabulary of silence—
if only for a small measure of days
to become new to ourselves,
to be introduced.
Who seeks the spirit of anything
is a world revolutionary.
XXXIII
The hour of closure.
A glass of serious wine.
Thunder on the ground, the sound
of a long freight wheeling the distance away.
Zephyr over the blue foothills.
Wind forceful enough to toll the chapel-bell.
XXXIV
Lie in a dark room, and look
upward, outward from yourself.
Let the darkness touch your features, its body settle over yours.
The night will wear the face of memory.
In that darkness, I felt
a fragment of the lettered past:
Reverend father,
when I received the Body and Blood from the spoon,
you were crying.
And I found myself
wanting to cry.
I swallowed the sustenance.
And as it moistened my throat,
we crumbled together.
The bread, its promise—
I, my derelict life.
XXXV
The old sexton told me, Never mind your empty heart.
Only a hollow stone can echo with knocking and invite you in.
XXXVI
The darkness splays out.
When we sleep, we go to the only true solitude.
Thick blankets keep us warm.
In the parlor, the grandfather
clock’s steady heartbeat
like the deepest,
forgotten memory.
We tuck the blanket’s twining tightly
around the form of our bodies,
stitchings that lend
strength to the garment.
It is winter, and black air
obscures the window
in the one season we cannot survive.
XXXVII
Hours after, the embered hearth
reflects upward.
XXXVIII
His great chest the mossy earth.
Pepper and salt.
The safe years.
XXXIX
Make prayer.
I drowse and, over the dark trestle,
the inaudible voices come.
XL
Smiling, your father calls you Monster, and embraces you.
XLI
Child-
like.
What could save us.
XLII
Wary on the lake-edge, a coyote leans to dark water and laps silver from the moon.
XLIII
What language best describes silence?
Who owns this voice
and can claim a way
to share solitude?
XLIV
I give you my aloneness. I open the alone of my time.
The hand opens. Rosewood blossom.
XLV
I may speak the name.
I say, soul. I say, God.
What of our inventions
has made us superior?
Buildings and deep meadows outlive us.
Cities gather us like cords of burnt-out men.
Who thought to defend ourselves
from ourselves,
when we have been our own barbarians?
What was invented
could not answer.
What was invented
gave distraction, scant hours,
but not time.
XLVI
I am too young to be tired,
but our century wearies
us all. We feel it,
the weight of time, crepitice of bone.
XLVII
We come to this.
Lightness of empty hands.
The Thanksgiving of nothing.
XLVII
To myself,
I spoke for myself.
It was all I could do.
XLIX
And whose voice
to take these words?
Collectively, we become but singular.
We cry out, and it is one cry.
L
After coming to closure,
the surprise of a rising sun.
The warmth of its reddened hair.
The grey air, heavy-misted.
LI
In the bedroom, I take
his clothes from the closet, and wear them.
LII
Son of diamond,
there has only been the father,
the faceted son, the mirror returning.
Black wings. Rasso.
The love we have still.
A love which starves the ego.
The one purity the world could not win.
I become the young patriarch.
Silence, the saint of poetry.
LIII
We own what never leaves us.
We own the truest voice we wish to speak with.
Whisper
this.
LIV
Each morning is air changed.
Conifers harden in the beginning slant of light.
I open the cabin door onto sharpness of air,
walk out to
wakening colors. A wide field of prairie-grass.
LVI
A thatch of trees with silvery leaves. The branches
dense with birdsound.
LVII
Deer tracks. Single footprints.
LVIII
Charred stones in a circle.
LIX
There are charred stones in a circle, their bright life
has moved on.
But the air is wisped
and traces the fragrant witness.
LX
The white ashes in a mound are comforting. Wade your hands into them.
LXI
Embrace. How can this word mean so much?
LXII
In the bluesmoke air,
see the stones have moved closer to you.
Feel the carbon
settle on your skin.
When all we wanted deeply
was transformation from ourselves.
The risk of everything familiar.
LXIII
What hour?
It is light,
and dark,
and light.
I untie my hair.
The smell of woodsmoke in it.
The thickness roots me.
LXIV
Hold to a silence voluminous.
Rumpled hill and plain.
Chipping flakes of green and silver lichen.
LXV
What is needed
but the joy of nothing?
What can be more secure than that?
Today, I go back to the old hands
that cradled my smooth face.
I take the word—fatherly—and possess it.
I look down.
My own hand is holding my throat.
LXVI
I have gathered these hours for years.
I have gathered the years.
LXVII
My shoes tread solidly over a blanket of pine needles.
The sound is crisp.
The elder trees stitch the sky in place.
There are the white, vaporous wraiths of morning mist
on the mouth of
You will go from this.
You will hold, fatherly, this image.
You will rustle the breath of your word, your mouth
giving shape to the depth of meaning.
You will own this voice.