Recollection of Light

Thu, 01 Nov 1990 00:00:00 -0500

Sitting at her brother’s drawing board,
pale wood, color of her skin,
she said she was drawing . . . conclusions.
The way she said it she knew they would laugh,
and they picked her up for ice cream.

Later she remembered that,
and later, after forgetting it,
she remembered again.
There was something about the room that day
she remembered:

the dining room,
how it was full of people,
although the people were in the living room,
and there were only three,
he and their father and mother.

Full of people,
and often later the world had been empty,
though full of people as an airplane,
a fat jumbo jet bound for Las Vegas.
It must have been full of something else,

the dining room that day,
the unweighty obligation
to protect one another,
also love and humor,
and, over all, the bright, silent chandelier.

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The Organbuilders

Mon, 01 Oct 1990 00:00:00 -0400

The name of the one organbuilder was Craft,
the other Dream, both descendants
of an ur-figure. Creation. To graft
metal to wood, not to look askance
at fanatics in the guise of shepherds,
and to listen with both delicacy and might
was required. A duration. Death herds
them and the congregation toward night,
night and the great golden-boulevarded day.
And the work proceeds. Plastics used,
computers daily, silences called prayer.
Ancestry and hi-tech fuse,
in ways not even savant visitors can perceive.
What’s finally dedicated has no name.
There’s no name for all this. Give leave
to time: Time and timing, flame
and flaming, weld and Spirit. Mystery
and hands’ midnight precision.
Of these things no one’s written history
satisfies. As in marriage, decision
comes into configuration with grace.
Men write books explaining wars.
Men, women, and children enter this place
to imagine another. The pipes are doors.

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Recollection of Light

The Organbuilders