Invisible green VI

American Poetry Review, The, Jul/Aug 2002 by Revell, Donald

"Methinks my own soul must be a bright invisible green."

-Henry David Thoreau, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 193 A poem is something to do in the meantime -not a pastime, but an active preparation (parable of the wise and foolish virgins, e.g.) as you and I await Horizon's homecoming. Poetry is horizon, of course, a godly site under way, and a true friend at sundown and in the morning. Prepared in good and alive heart, the poem may speed Horizon just a little or stride to meet it on its way. Walt knew: "I am afoot with my vision." And, via Ezra, Li Po too:

In the meantime, a poem proves a succession of behaviors, and these are bodies shown by motion, meaning motion over time. The metaphysics are entirely physical. Blossom is a branch's miraculous horizon, a poetry that glories it, just as sunrise glories those prudent mountains east of me. Branch and mountain are busy. Each prepares in every direction-there are 360 degrees of horizon-for a brightness under way.

So preparation is a behavior whose first motion instantly pluralizes itself. Writing for Horizon, we do not write ourselves into corners but towards eternity ("The authors are in Eternity"-Wm Blake) whose body is numberless. A line prepares for the next line which is likely more than one. Take, for example, Williams's great poem "Young Sycamore."

I must tell you this young tree whose round and firm trunk between the wet

pavement and the gutter (where water is trickling) rises bodily

into the air with one undulant thrust half its height-- and then

dividing and waning sending out young branches on all sides

hung with cocoons it thins till nothing is left of it but two

eccentric knotted twigs bending forward hornlike at the top

Thrust out of itself, the tree becomes itself innumerably. A line acts even so. Each is a lineament of some further embodiment in real time. Horizon is Horizon because of where and when it prepares to be next. Likewise, this sycamore shows itself on a line. Then it's sped, preparing towards an eternity of white space already inscribed, already fleshed by two twigs.

Poem prepares for poetry. In the sycamore, earth prepares for air. Such brightening is not bodiless, but a succession of bodies. The really metaphysical poem-i.e. something of use Here, of use Now as soul-making and soul-moving-concerns neither objects nor conceits. It is no reliquary. It is no "bracelet of bright hair about the bone." Its business is change in all directions which are one Horizon, continuing: a body departed; a body only now arriving.

Flesh of fire prepares for flesh of light, right here at the surface. In the poem, this surface is a line, a preparation inclined towards surfaces more perfectly present. Fleshly and sharp for cutting, as metaphysical as the edge of a holly-leaf where it meets the air. "Qui laborat, orat." The work is prayer. It is a presence addressed to something near and answering very closely.

I mean this literally. It is nothing ghostly, just as nothing ghostly happened the other night-January 7, 2002-to me. It was the first night of the new semester, starry-cold and clear in Salt Lake City. I had an hour to spend before my poetry workshop, and so I walked across the campus, ending up at the library. I went inside to look at magazines. Inside The Nation, I found a poem called "Forever" -by Shahid Ali who'd died exactly one month prior to the night I'm writing about. The poem was dedicated to me, and I'd not known my friend had written it. Suddenly, the question of eternity was very much a physical fact at hand-like the cold outside, and the starry sky, and the lighted room full of younger poets across the quad waiting for me and for Shahid and, whether they believed in it or not, for eternity.

Even Death won't hide the poor fugitive forever. The nightwork before me would be a prayer addressed to them, just as Shahid's "Forever" was and remains an answer under way to my busy waiting. It is very real presences poems prepare, and new bodies, nearly. Forever, like the edge of a leaf and the latest news from the dead and all such horizons, is never more of the same.

The horizon of eternity dotes upon substance, and so the soul prepares substantialness. Eliot oughtn't to have been ironic. Our metaphysics are warm, being physical from the first (e.g. it was a particular and a cold night, and then and there did Shahid's poem happen to me) and being occupied early with eternity. In a poem called "My Spirit," Thomas Traherne puts this occupation forward as the first substance and first behavior of a simply naked I.

Life is act. Mind is substance, and our senses, those living conduits of Horizon, shape selves and souls whose "essence" is "capacity," a fact prepared to be filled. We are sites where soul is sighted. And a poem is likewise a volume (but not a vacuum) made for poetry. The eye opens, and only then is it an organ of vision. The poem opens, and only then comes poetry. The eye and the dean page are simples, like the simpleness of God, making places for their own. But never their own until the place is made, until, as Traherne says later, "essence is transformed into a True / And perfect act." Bodies build the fires where metaphysics glow.