just now
some moments appear out of nowhere,
messages from deep space
saying this, too, is who you are,
and the stun of it can almost be too much to bear.
like that time i emerged from the backseat
passenger side of a car holding five travelers,
teachers brought together to study arthurian literature
of the middle ages at the university of puget sound
in tacoma. and on a july morning break from courtly love
and knights of the round table and geoffrey of monmouth
and chrétien de troyes and stories of noble quake and quiver,
the driver, a seasoned fellow from the east coast,
took us to higher elevations and when he stopped the car at a turnout,
i didn’t know why but opened the door and turned from the forest
to the open space over my shoulder
and i don’t know if i cried first or gasped
at her highness, her blinding light, still wrapped in snow,
like the queen of all worlds and the consummate shudder
of seeing something just now that had been there all along.
then years later, coming from a day in costa brava
by boat and then train, southbound toward barcelona,
commuters traveling opposite, at a stop i cannot name
but that gave view of the sea. i had looked up while reading
an article in the sun called “water, water everywhere:
ran ortner’s love affair with the sea,” a mystical contemplation
on painting the ocean, and a painting appeared out the window
and i grabbed my canon sureshot and snapped a moment
that lives in me just now. a man holding a bag in each hand,
his back to the train, his hairline receded, his front to the water,
suitcoat still on, a car off center, the starkness and longing
of a wyeth or a hopper maybe,
and i wondered if he was thinking more about where he had been
or where he was going and i knew the gift was
in the question and the scene and in me.
and many years later,
reading with an intimate from cormac mccarthy’s the crossing
the words…. “He woke all night with the cold. He’d rise and mend back the fire and she was always watching him. When the flames came up her eyes burned there like gatelamps to another world. A world burning on the shore of an unknowable void. A world construed out of blood and blood’s alcahest and blood in its core and in its integument because it was that nothing save blood had the power to resonate against the void that threatened hourly to devour it.”.
and how we shared the sentience of language, the uplift and shimmer,
the way words can nurse a place in the belly that food cannot fill.
Passage excerpted from Vintage Books edition of Cormac McCarthy’s The Crossing, p. 73.
