I    Time past is the unimaginable present.

There was the stick, there was the bone
Down by the wood where the trillium grows
Beside the crick on the long road home
That bade me stop by its icy flows.
That bade me follow where the Taffy Man goes.

There was no special sign, no mark
No county map, no roadside shows;
A creek that wrapped itself with dark,
The fading echo of the meadowlark
That sang to the Taffy Man long ago.

There, the tree once rigged for death
In ghastly lanterns' dark display,
To whirl above the mortised laugh,
To dance the chimeless soft-rope sway
That, like a beacon, turns toward us
And, like a beacon, turns away.

It was under the silence of a wailing moon
on field burst in bloom, a violent tapestry,
that mob-things crept from black-thicket weave
and the widow from her darkened room
knew darkest the stain under autumn leaf.

Then evening ink was drawn across the sky,
Combed by the finest brush of dusk
Until the brush itself ran dry
over the hill where the cottonwood stood,
silent and still as an empty husk.


2   Time present can only be imagined.

Home lay on the table, rough-faced
and aged in a yellowing haze of Ben Day dots,
no way to recover what random thoughts
ran through his mind like coffee-stains, or worse,
Mr. Collapsing Universe in a state of shock
from a two-column slug on the justified page.

As well, he'd returned from ancestral graves
and the grassless gardens of Kyoto stayed
cold and poemless in their silent conversation
that rang like the bells of exile, tolling away
across an ocean, looping the ends of time
over itself, setting in motion a convenant with earth
& art under the last cover of the coverlet sky —
stick and bone is what remains from the ash of birth—
a stroke of crow against the weather vane.
-
He must have recognized, made it flesh,
something he sought, now something sought him,
the dismal gray stuff sloughed away to compare
to his own fresh brown skin, the vagrant whims
of gravity pulling the one down, the other across
as if imaging them in superset, the I and thee
seen through the x and y of his eye;
a careful positioning of the sky
the earth awash with indignity.
Life described as

                           a drop-foot fold in rolled pant cuff
with tufts of cotton-white hair on rice-stalk stem,
limbs to clutch the canvass of a painted sun,
moon stretched over the color of skin
and the bone-thin membrane of horizon
to mark precisely the azimuth of death.    folding in,
all folding in between that breath and.
At what star might he
                                                   have gazed upon?

Locked in the imaginary present of time past,
one cannot see the moment before the work.
He could have skipped the noose & cut him down,
offering the husk-form, its final agony to rest
in some tumuli or mound. Instead, he chose to
keep the rope and set it free. It was an exile's choice,
as only an exile knows, & he

(exile to exile, they might have discussed
the pros and cons of homelessness or considered some
community design to the proper fit of loneliness).
The measuring begins.

The rest was lightening struck:

Wake up! The Taffy Man appears
and the pulling, and the shears begin
the cutting apart, the outcast part; the tears—

That rip the real from its shabby seam
Pull metal chord from cloth of sorrow,
Stretch sinew into noble beam,
Weld stick to bone, meld plow to furrow;
Forge steel with magnolia dream
To build ships in the deserts of Jerusalem.


3. The Meadowlark

Recall whispers. What was forgot shakens leaf
and bough alike forsaken by that gentle hill and those
still (and they had said, then, the practice tapered off),
still it had been the horror that it was and, as always, was
evermore than skin-deep; that we did not concentrate
on those wrought from our reconstituted thought, though
we'd settle for an uneasy fade, by then we/and we all and y'all
beneath the shade, by then we were where they'd already been
on ten-thousand otherwise otherwise days. Some consecrated,
some not. But not a single tree that was dedicated to the art
of bended knee or otherwise, by root ingrown & overflowing
its cup, hoisted one dark drink from those icy waters below,
nor would it think: this is just about as far as we can go;

                                                        but it would re-dedicate
that part apart ( the I hidden in there!) perhaps the leg
of cross like lamb, hazy in the glass jar, the yellowing news
where it was old news even then, old& other, that it was
the wasms of "their mistake" that held to the practice
until that became the endowment of an inalienable art --
a greatness that would someday spear itself , shock and all,
in its own eye - that alone, that apart was what I saw
was stick
                                          and what was bone,
I saw that was bone, too, and I took the one,
and I stood my art against the wall
and I took the other in my arms
and laid it bare before me on the table
and called out in as sweet a voice as I dared
the song of the meadowlark I had heard so
long ago, a requiem to gravity and air;

But there is no stone at Arlington to answer this.
No memorial rock, placed so. No Deacon's
prayer cascades from the Tomb of the Unkown Tree,
and what should be enshrined there is what it was
and what it was he was, as well. That should be there too.
To wait there beside the cottonwood until the beacon
turns again, feel the pull of pure monel against the wind
and rain and when the sun-rot rope drops like stone to ground.