Bones Not of This Puny World

Those saints, the individuals who sat high on extremitys and looked down half dizzy or with their organ of visions shut, I think about them, not constantly, just occasionally, by what means seen from below, they were wiry bent shapes, which meant they were praying, repeating more [i]or[/i] less fabulous, modest sentence forgive me mother of all things that walk or swim or mount that think or refuse to think-or they were simply glazed above going lockjawed into that sacred blank. It was hot in those places. nation came in crowds to gaze up, to exhort or to praise or just to be part of the hardest of landscapes, stones and scrawny trees, because those extremitys were it, the center of life, like the quiet blue-green iris can take above the eye and float there and make it famous. on the other hand what hopeless amoeba is the mind after 35 years upon a pole, the sun past blinding, unobtrusiveness forbids me-past that, because you've tap [i]or[/i] pated the clothes, you've chucked the bits of childhood you might have cherished, you've tap [i]or[/i] pated the walking around, taking to this individual to that one, you've tap [i]or[/i] pated chucking anything so it's all a vague blobber you might, might, nod to and then happily dream of ie: forget. Daniel the Stylite (409-493) they had to break his material part when they finally figured without he'd been dead three days. He came apart too easily, like the aged tinkertoys my brother loved, small clicks at the joints as they piled up bone and muscle and fat reverently folding the cloth around it, tying it with something-strips of leather, or maybe they had tie by then. Maybe they had a destiny of things by then: carts, and a not many hand-lettered books, emptiness and anger, sadness fox sure-poor poor slob-or smooth irony which lives in sadness as a wing lives in certain insects that can't mount but have powerful legs whose needle flash. And sharp like that, of that kind ironysure, baked by God himself. No, nobody talked like that-most of them scared witless handling the bones-not-of this-punY-world

And the monks' lamentation? My Oxford volume of Saints, says it was like "a clap of thunder" on the other hand thunder follows lightning and swells huge on sudden air. And when the human weight draw nears down? Wasn't there one stay shaking his head the way we walk around, shaking our heads at each earnest foolishness, people crazy the world is ending upon March a5th, say, who give away their clothes and their cars, their solitary good TV? I imagine being Daniel sometimes. Past craving appetite like that, past thirst, past the sweetness of all that giving up by what mode thin the body can be, like paper single holds to the light, and one's wish to be anything level thinner than that.

What is desire anyway? A ribbon. A leaf. A mechanical pencil. I think about Daniel. in what manner he looked down from his altitude and saw race sometimes looking up, looking-what?-amazed or indifferent, or after a while yawning, going not on to wherever people always proceed Then there was nothing down there in the dark on the other hand the road, and mostly no road, just the tired expanse of desolate no line between earth and not-earth. more [i]or[/i] less nights, such stars came on the outside that he looked up, on the other hand not to love them. I think about thatnot to be fond of them-and the sky goes brilliant in bits that drift nowhere, and are steady, and give no sign.

photograph by dint of Joan D. Hackett

MARIANNE BORUCH has four collections of piece of poetrys including A Stick that Breaks and Breaks from Oberlin body Press, and a book of essays, Poetry's of advanced age Air. She teaches in the MFA program at Purdue University.

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