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Here You Are: The Wild Night
Raging in place, the cottonwood tumbles
tosses, minor branches thick with leaves
surging like waves, breaking on wooden reefs.
The four trunks reach like aged arms
into the green wave at the edge of emptiness
the raging fury of black desert sky
fiercely blowing nothing out of nothing.
I am who am, the great heaving void
immense compared to you, who fear me
which I do. I sleep beneath that tree
in my adobe cellar, thick walled
timber roofed but also nothing, invisible
to the tree should it decide to fall.
The oblong window, hinged at the top
blows open, like my eyes, the wind
indescribable, a whipping branch of birch
in a Russian steam bath, on bare backs
of men who can never get clean enough,
the roaring of the Mississippi in flood
stripping away its dikes, the screaming shshsh
of a thousand haggard witches, keeping
and at the same time telling their secrets.
But not all at once, crescendo, and then
an easing, the window blows closed, open
open closed, the trunk looming above
whose underground structure envelopes me
creaks, croaks, an immense cellulose frog
feral, warning me in deepest voice,
Beware. I plan the leap, my escape.
Craaaak, I spring to the far wall.
Craaaak, I roll to the nether one.
I wait for the rending of the ancient wood
that somehow holds back the wind.
Is this what makes a poem, invisible wind
random nightmare in a moonless night?
Nothing, millions of miles of nothing.
The wind blows as if it came all the way
from the sinuous curve of the Big Dipper.
What pull, what catastrophic vacuum
What push, what hammering high
What mad column of down driven air
pounds the wind from the mesa to the west
pulls it from behind Sandia Crest???
Or is it not natural, righting balance
but a spirit arising from the Rio Grande
Or the depths of Carlsbad?
I rise
go outside to look. Snap, whoosh.
The first branch is down, roof bouncing
rolling. Is that the end of it or
is there more to come? No way
of knowing looking at the sky, vast
no cloud, no thunderhead, no
rush of airborn cumulus or sirrus.
No rain. This is a dry wind, dry
not about water, no release.
If there were no tree, it would have
no meaning. This is a test
a trial: Has my giant cottonwood
met its match? Is this the century wind
to lay low this most magnificent
strong and patient beauty, this work of art?
Not yet. The damage is slight by day.
The tree stands above the red roof
tame in the midst of its neighborhood
nothing to show of its valor, no trace
of the wild night or the poetry in it.
Twain of Thought
Twain says
"History does not repeat itself
it rhymes."
If I had half the brain of Twain
I'd say
times progress
as mysteries do, by clue.
The plot is not the knot
by which the deed you can undo.
Instead, the head
which means to lead itself
by knowing truth
begins at the beginning
and never jumps
a page.
It often ranges backward
to count the dead
and measure changes
which seldom add to much themselves
but do mount up concatenated
like the bells
tintinabulated
to more than what they seem.
So it is that crimes are solved
and what were days become a dream
of how and why and all the ways
things were done and tales were sung.
Mark it well, says the sage
see it there upwelling
from then and thence
the lost age
from whence
our fountainhead is truly sprung.
Whodunit is less compelling in the end
than how one thing becomes another
as letters do arranged in spelling
or stories do in the telling.
The treat, the treasure, the glory, the gain
is the one deed chosen
that completes the train.
Brian Ibsen is Director, Corporate/Foundation Relations, The University of New Mexico Foundation, Inc., Albuquerque, NM. (September, 2004)
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