POEM

So Sure of Nowhere Buying Times to Come

by Jorie Graham

1.

I understood that there must have been.

And then the two folds of this world.

Towards us, thus marking time in time.

A gaping hole:

the yes suspended in the amniotic sac:

the end.

That there must have been.

That there might have been.


2.

I understood then, in the intersection.
At the heart of the cross, in the traffic jam.
No matter that the light had changed.
The long mechanical howls going up from the gridlock.
As if a stairway had collapsed,
and we, each with our single destination at the core,
there inside the car—
(the point-awaiting-us now beating at the core),
(beating above the hum, mid-air, mid-car, yet wrapped by the ticking, honking shell)—
(by the shell of measurement, by the dream of passage)—as if we
were the rungs, the individual upwardgoing steps,
now crumbled in a heap
down here, having forgotten, each, the place we naturally once held,
there in that runged and buoyant upwardness ...
Each with our right-measurement of hope,
the way an upwardness contains the dry backbone of hope,
construes it, like the rising of pitch in assertion,
or a gazelle fleeing up a slope,
constantly looking back, to see how far,
always a slight curve as we move towards purification.


3.

A churchbell rang. A sawed-off lodgepole-limb stared out.
The traffic, bit by flaring bit, dressed by light, then by noonlight,
stayed there. Like a lid on a thing.
Like a gigantic bronchial growth devoid of breathing room.
Us watching the cross grow deeper, longer,
with all the glitziness of blessing,
the everyone-who-is-us constantly arriving, the four streets filling,
the four directions meeting, blurred,
in us,
the spot outside consequence, the blind, whorled spot,
where there is no longer push, or inch along, or halt,
and you should turn the motor off,
let the keys hang, the glittery tailfeathers of the bird
up to its eyes in ignition,
let it hang,
put the hands down into the strangely distant lap,
put the hands down, the eye in its anxious glancings down,
till the lid seems to release the Emergent altogether from its flow,
and lowers,
letting the circle of outwardness narrow,
the hurry, like a deep root stilling, abiding,
the stalk-end slimming,
the filmy thicknesses of to-and-fro narrowing,
the parts of the picture the glance sews up
beginning to break into separate puddles—
oh what aftermath of what great storm is this—
featurelessness settling its flyapart dust
on the one who predicts, on the one who follows,
on the yew bushes, on the republic,
on the traffic jam undeferrable,
in the homesick country....


4.

In that country, where the last thought sank to the floor, amid the gleaming tailpipes and the newly laid-off, just above the stony chips of specific destinations—held firm in flesh like bullets flesh survived—gently, airily—where the thrumming batteries beggar motion—what breaks down breaks down—in that unmaking, that stalling—eyes mid-height in their windowframes—unable to catch other eyes for the gleam—there, in the third minute of the noon hour, twitching slightly then rising on the widening circles of accumulating exhaust, a small brown plastic grocery-bag, empty, handle-straps pointing earthward, apricot-beige, soapsud beige, like a voice in the next room one can’t quite make out, rises, up into the throat, the congestion, up high, in the grip of heat-fumes and the nervous embroiderer’s pause—hand mid-air, needle midflight—dream tired but knowing still to rise—lifts beyond the picture—as if intended all along—and the leaves whispering, at the crook of each curve the leaves collecting—the eye, no longer singing in tune with the collecting brain, watching the bag rise—spell with a name on its swollen belly—almost sinking now above the rows—only to catch again on something clockwise, updrafting, now gathering shine, now quarrying the emptiness for furling laws and, up, up, wielding utter particularity in this pregnant bagfulness, and so on ...