Raptus

The door to the past is a strange door. It swings open and things pass through it, but they pass in one direction only. No man can return across that threshold, though he can look down still and see the green light waver in the weeds.

          Loren Eiseley

A door opens in the wilderness.

People cross through it—bloused women families

 

Acquaintances friends all the ones I have loved

Sleep-walkers night-walkers each dazed and shorn—

 

Street aurous with ice, a snowfall scratched into

Moons—and everything I’d known—

 

Inside the bleak floating light of my lungs

In the capillaries of my eyes a blood

 

Glancing through the hatches—

If I said I would always be grateful

 

If I lied or touched with spite

If night is just a foamline of shadows

 

Though we were both lost—the door

Opening—the fear of being shown

 

Whole to the one who must love you still—

And stopped as if on a walk to say

 

Look at that and what matters what really counts

And I’ll tell you everything if you promise I promise

 

I stood at door and behind me heard

Snow-plows scrape against roads

 

At the center of night—unknown to yourself

And the word I said out-loud to no one

 

That meant it was all to no purpose

The word for the desire inside destruction

 

For everything that can never be brought back—

Loose snow blown hard to each bank

 

And the common reel of those who

To avoid one extreme rush toward its opposite—

 

Snow blasted to piles—and never opened up to

Anything that could reach me until you reached me—

 

Which hours belonged to us

When was I unknowingly alone

 

Why did you always return to walk here a path

Behind my closed eyes shedding salt

 

Dry snowfall and sticks—still were you here

With me I might say The moon rose in the casement window

 

The red-haired boy across the street has learned to ride his bike

There are still picnics there are fountains

 

And the world I am leaving behind says

One learns to see one learns to be kind—

 

I closed my eyes I closed my hands

I shut down the fields in my arms

 

The cattle on the plains veins ditches

Blue ravines a gray bird

 

Sailing through a poplar brake kids

Throwing snow I closed the last swinging juncos

 

Sheep wool caught on barbed wire I closed

Fumes and clear patches of sky I seized

 

The river the town I shut down

The hard muscles of sleep farmlands

 

Warming under midnight salt-lights scruff-pines

On the ridge animals scattering across slopes I closed

 

The smooth bone of evening a storm

On the hills white and noiseless spindled

 

Prairies where I was born I shut I seized

The clouds I closed in anger—fervor—ardor