The Sources of Light

Mornings before dawn I rose

and lit the kerosene latern

and took the cane pole from a corner in the barn

and then went down a road through the fields to a creek where

it bent around behind a hedge of Osage Orange.

After setting the line

I built a fire to keep mosquitoes away,

and fished for an hour or two, sometimes for nothing.

I was ten and confident and I thought

all the sources of light had a common ancestor in God…

my lantern;

the lights in the town in the valley

where I was forbidden to go;

flashes from firecrackers inches away from my fingers;

the searing of lightning

                        crossing the plains on crooked legs…

I thought these held in common

some memory of the stars

before they were broken into a million pieces—

like the fireflies I gathered in a jar

to read by phosphorus…

that same light belonging to corn

whose fuses flared more gold against black clouds,

and more green before they died.

I don’t know when I figured out how wrong I was

or when I knew that each light

in the valley

had a life circling around it like a small, grey moth.

I remember

but memory is the edge of a cliff

where light has no where to go but out.

I tried to reach beyond that. In the middle of my life

I tried to walk straight into that light

that only the dying see, the one that burns in all the others

                        and covers itself up in forever.

I stood on the edge of nothing

in the whispering of a random present,

pulling my hand back out of the flames

like a child pulling it loose to freedom.

Originally Published in: Prairie Schooner
 
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I will be with you,

a common thing you use everyday,

a brush, a necklace,

the favorite stone you hold in your hand

when you’re afraid.

I can’t be more than this

and I’ve grown deaf to the world

like an old man whose thoughts

are the white birds asleep in the stones of cathedrals,

like the emptiness inside them.

All poetry on this page
Copyright © by Marlon Fick, 2007 

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Puget Sound

We reach for the smallest things first:

a wing bone from a sea gull, pieces

of kelp that break apart easily.

We hardly notice the afternoon

spreading itself too thinly across the Sound,

making the bright bones dark.

Or maybe we notice, out there

there is nothing beyond even our not knowing,

feeling it in each hand,

the dark bones in each finger

of each hand.

I’ve been up late

listening to the steady notes of a ferry

sound and release. It holds on

for a moment and releases, like

your love for me.

I’m standing on the shore, wanting

to see between notes.

You never made me restless.

Perhaps you know I can’t understand the waves,

close and away.

In this inaudible drift

a diver surfaces, deaf

to bring his dark bones back

from where the sea was holding them,

back to the surface of not knowing.

Now, watching, I’m learning that the shore

is somehow never right

and so

is always shifting.

A stone scratches a cold wind

out of a stone. Another piece washed up

we bend to like a promise.

Originally Published in: Denver Quarterly

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Anniversary

This evening an indolent wind moves between us

where you hanged yourself

in the stars like chimes.

There is an empty space my eyes console

where the witchgrass cripples with frost

and your prosthesis sags and sweats

to nurse a blouse—its mums commingling

with the lavenders and moonlight.

With what celerity the mathematicians

count as lost, the snow

undertakes your silences.

The other woman’s lips become to me the rim

of your grave the snow tries to fill.

My nights are full of wind and destruction.

I could have torn out my tongue and moaned

over the cold months

like wind crossing an empty bell—

I found you everywhere, the hunt

as winter, the one

the world prayers to

or will undress for, the snow

our bodies

melt into

flowerwater.