CONVERSATION AFTER THE BALLET
27 bones of hand, 3 of arm, 26 of foot,
chains of small bones,
the remaining 94, and a vast flexuous
musculature holding them—
all induced into flight.
Music & the body.
The job least likely to be replaced by Artificial
Intelligence, I say to my friend,
is Principal Dancer with the Canadian
National Ballet.
Nothing except the actual body
is a body.
Music lifts her.
She is saying that a computer program
learned how Beethoven
was Beethoven. Maybe, I say.
But can AI match a couple, hidden in
Temescal Canyon,
moving smoothly under willows, circled
by a hawk? No, she agrees.
Can AI speak in the language of spring
on the mountain?
No algorithm can prove a ripe
gooseberry, a whispering flax, sun-detonated
lilies.
Odors, qualities of light, rhythms now
hidden beneath memory.
We are trading now, only in the way we
can.
Emerging from stiffness, as one finds
the grace in an arm.
She grew up in Calgary, studied in
Russia, returned to Canada.
Matchless singularities. We look so small at table.
LAST
THINGS CREATED ON THE EVE OF THE FIRST SABBATH
Mouth
of the earth, punched into the sandstone cliff behind my house.
Mouth
of a spring, gushing from Banias cave at the foot of Mount Hermon.
Mouth
of the well, amid maples, and birch of Boscu’s farm.
The
piled stone walls around his meadows.
Chewing
mouth of the donkey, standing on three legs in Hubbard’s field,
with
summer hay reaching up to its fetlocks.
A
rainbow. Scrambled eggs my grandmother
fed me in her yellow kitchen.
The
temples of imagination crafted from a substance that cuts
through
iron, stone, diamond.
The
story I wrote in my Senior year at Hollywood High School
of
how I’d sneak into the bathroom on Sabbath Eve,
rub
on the Old Spice After Shave, then return to table,
believing
that no one could tell. Mrs. Robinson’s
note to me:
“You
can be a poet.”
Some
say also demons were created, the grave of Moses,
the
Ram of Abraham, and tongs to lift out of the iron blast furnace a boy.
DYBBUK
Forty-carat
blue diamond (with one crack),
still
in its matrix of black rock. Clear as
blue air washed
in
sparkling needle-clusters of pines.
The
man only partly finished the stone (rough meets polished)
which
he keeps in a drawer, wrapped
in
a handkerchief.
He’s
a specialist in cutting through what the eye can see
to
the inclusions and flaws we live & spend a lifetime to realize.
He
hammer-cleaves only when he wakes up deranged, and never on a Monday or Friday.
He
disappears from himself for hours, which might be years in the desert,
where
none of us admit we died of thirst long ago.
For
this man, the mirage of a pool is nonetheless real.
He
knows at least this much:
Any
stone that appears polished
must
be cut precisely at the lines of its imperfection.
MOORCHILD
Crawled
through a hole in the fence, down
into
the gully's wet throat to the willows and walnuts,
where
he drank the creek’s amber odors.
He
heard the kids on the hot playground
playing
dodge ball, tether ball, foursquare, chase.
This
boy was alone every lunch.
Did
the teachers see him disappear, light as a seed
and
beyond time as the bells rang?
Why
did he start? How did he fall into it?
No
one saw and no one worried.
Green
breath rose to him from ferns
sycamores
extended their palms.
Flycatchers
and gnatcatchers
were
Cherubim in the oaks. Were Seraphim
on
the sandstone. Were Malachim in the wind.
Every
thirst in his throat
became
his choice, even a vocation.
He
belonged to moths and voles.
On
his tight shoulders,
ease
settled unfailingly,
glowing
capes of moss.
