Emerson Susquehanna



i. “When we have lost our God of tradition


Not thaw brought to the river—

          thought, long winter a surface that holds

no current or image.

          And there’s language laid down like that, mind



locked in a long walk through the chill of a single word, and there’s cattails

          fraught where water’s not

any longer, and God’s a pall called down to mind the meaning
   
          given a life. Once thought



the word makes mind too small

          like Bible-colored Sundays all study and chalk and exotic

potted palms dotting a holy land
                                                  
          entirely crayon and the lavender mimeographs leave



on the hands. The word God has always been my mother’s

          fingers separating

my sister’s hair, three strands gathered in a braid so tight white at the parted dark
     
          roots stood out, word



a migraine in its wake, word endured alone in a room. Shades

          drawn over pain, word’s

a mind’s light ingrown, caught, nitid knot snarled upon
 
          itself…Subzero, months



from thaw, we walk—o trees, trouble,

          tremble at the roots of being, underneath,

under laws, the order of things

          so deeply a violence and unnumbered like the snow.   



ii. & ceased from our God of rhetoric


But I don’t know
          their names—rust


worked under each
          wing like sweat


lunettes; synthetic
          silk crest stitched


to a white head;
          small gears completely


grease preening
          ash, mechanical


sheen of oil,
          charcoal—only

           
this description eats
          and screams 


squanders territory.
          What use is it


to see? Faith
          the world is knowable?


There are ways
          to understand



and none is living
          or lyric, limp


or stutter.
          If I send a letter


(this sudden utter
          other means


than speech)
          when I don’t


know to love
          language other


than to run
          a larceny


all machine and god-
          likeness, gear


and hinge, pocket
          watch, tie-


pin, money clip and wing
          tip, my father’s


impostor I am
          then, my words


a mere guess at
          what isn’t. It isn’t


mastery I’m after.
          It’s certain


other terms
          than my own


I wait for. For
          instance : birds


without names
          fly anyway


ceaselessly
          up the ladder


cast from visible
          to invisible—is it


it only seems
          there’s a way


to know the way? 



iii. then may God fire…with…presence.”


And you can never catch it 
                                                            nor make it still


and so it is like thought in this
                                                  or weather


that you might live within it
                                        or by its constraints


but never touch it—
                              and there is the sorrow


it will never know you


though you feel all winter
                                        the shiver of how it never hesitates


in touching you.
                              Or, said another way :


it snowed all day and into the night.
                                                  The view developed


slowly like a photograph
                                        in a bath of chemicals—


what began as white
                              grew whiter


by virtue of contrast
                              until it seemed overexposed
so little shadow was left
                              like a sentence revised too often.


What happens is the mind
                              travels outward


because it wants to be the soul it has heard tell of.
                                                            Nervous work


like a bird—sky and power line, garbage can, underbrush—
                                                                      it goes to them;


it intends itself toward oily black seeds
                                                   toward reflections


in ice and in glass
                              and it goes to the wind


and is shut out
                    which is no one’s home.


Ever leave-taking,
                    action is its only description :
      

each shadow on the lamp-lit street
                                                  seeming to rush—molting out of itself—


each upward
                    to snow—

             
multitude of hurry, confusion—midair
                                        to meet the idea that made it—