Ritual Sight iii

The third poem was published by itself in 1992 in Poetry. It is my proudest and most successful, but was always meant to be part of the whole five part cycle. It is the most direct, and it's directness is it's power. More after the poem.

iii.

You like cloudless, cold afternoons
At four, trimmed nails, how this hour
Seems your visual end of day, but still

Not dusk. You cut your nails
Thursdays. You like birds that flap their
Wings to fly, the feel of nails on wood, the lake

Under a scratched sky. You like all
Your Thursdays- back and back, or towns
Who stand marker to a past, a notion, a scene.

The Thursdays stretch in green water- waves
Like bricks to the turn of shore. You like
The idea of town, of countless starlings

Circling a town's one apartment tower. You
Like your nails cut. You like how history
Breaks, re-emerges as water breaks

With a turtle's green carapace. You like four p.m.
On any day, nails on your face, broken roads that split
Like the past, clean or carnival. You like copper

Wire. You like the feel of cement, the taste
Of cold on days the afternoon will carry
Until morning. You like wire

Between you fingers. You like cavalry
Battles in books, the closing of past on present, always,
As drakes dive for nickel colored mud. You like

The clipped flight of starling wings, bending
Wire to animal shapes, the sleeping tower
Wild with dusk-light calls. Men ride

From the past, moving over stone- your quick
Breath, how you like your nails in palms, as the last
Hoof sounds behind your arching back.

You like afternoons the greenest water
And waves, the tower's reflection, your hands'
Shell bowls, seem shelters in mostly unbroken cliffs.



The rhythm of this poem was the most important to me, as I wrote and revised. I tend to work a bit with language and enjoy odd meter, as a composer might switch to an odd key to bring discordance but work in an identifiable framework. But for this poem, I wanted very orderly free form. I wanted the story to lay on the page in fairly orderly verses and stanzas. When I read the poem out loud, I build to the last four stanzas, quickening my pace until the last, when I slow like a runner past the tape.

The you in this section is my father, but only as I imagined him to be with some of me thrown in. He was a neat freak- always preferring orderliness. I find I'm becoming more and more like him. He was also an intense history buff.