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| Ronald Johnson [Isola di Rifiuti] |
from Ronald Johnson’s To Do As Adam Did: Selected Poems:
Four Orphic Poems [excerpts]
I
. . .
Outside,
between bone & page, circlings
of sap, stars, tide
hold meaning
as a nest holds speckled bird’s eggs,
& I (like
Thoreau) sit here engrossed,
‘between a microscopic & a telescopic
world’,
attempting to read
the twigged, branchy writing
of frost, spider & galactic cluster. That the syllables!
— rock & flower & animal
alike —
among the words,
make Order.
The field is newly plowed & unfenced. Its furrows
hold innumerable seeds
which have come on the wind, on wings
of birds.
What new green
script
will crack their burr & prickle? What words
must I corner like
hedge-hogs
to put them on a page?
. . .
III
At night in the New Jersey woods, we were awakened
by the bucks
circling our camp.
They would stamp the earth
& cough
in their rut, continuing the night through.
They would pause only
at the beam of
a flashlight. Then rings of blue
orbs
burned back at us. Lyres,
remember,
were tuned to those intervals between the known
planets — Saturn, Jupiter, Mars,
Venus & Mercury —
to indicate the ‘harmony’, music of the spheres, that played
in a measure
hidden, ineluctable
to an ear.
. . .
All night
the earth reverberating
with their hooves,
& at morning
the birds singing.
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