Читать книгу Birds, Metals, Stones and Rain - Russell Thornton - Страница 13

Greenness

What am I now that I was then

—Delmore Schwartz, “Calmly We Walk Through This April’s Day”

I turn to grass tufts and see unsullied

clear greenness displaying its steel. I see

what I should see, simple close-mown spring grass

like that of any suburban house lawn.

I turn again and decades disappear

and I see the dark grass all down the block—

I wake, run out of a basement and go

reeling across yard after wide yard. Here,

I unlock a gate. Swing it open. Go

to a neighbour’s front door. I knock, and ask

for help. But I am still half in the house

where I crouch, and we gaze at each other,

my mother and I, while my father holds

her so she will burn in the fireplace flames—

it is only a pretend me who asks.

Here, a woman blankets me and leaves me

in a den. The simple grass I turn to

is of the same greenness that pierces me

where I sit in a deep plush chair and hear

a man on a phone, sink and right away

begin to dream of grass. Lawns touch my bare

feet with cold dew and make me swift, shoot me

full of starlight the grass stores in its maze

of roots and make me shine bright. Here, I slip

out of the blanket, the den, and go back

outside and down the rows of blades all

waiting to take me in. What I bring,

I bring to grass to help it find its way

beyond every house. I turn to grass

that is close-mown, sunlit in the morning,

and turn to the grass that rinses my eyes

wide for the dark. When the soft spring rain flows

busy through grass, the always houseless night

helps continue this beginning. When grass

lengthens and men come to cut it, I laugh

with the laughing greenness. Unknown heaven

in its depth in the grass, once here cannot

be unmade. What I am now that I was

then can only be what is in grass—here

in what reaches breathing, reaching nowhere

but from blade to blade. It breathes and is iron

that is not cast by anyone but grows.