John High
Dialogue XXXX for Nina Iskrenko
—a wandering word
…so the thing needed to say itself, stark color of leaves
—all your life you had waited;
& acorns fallen by questions, what a field
might dream in others;
—already in the wound, yes;
a study of seeing & a one-eyed boy going into whistles
not hearing minarets hearing now,
(still here, to hear, an unending quiet);
& dialogues too of sun in morning sun
—good talks with the dead--
when he finds he will be troubled—hey there,
you, and our last unsayings waking a body:
(the book of the unwritten, it is time
to return it. you are not it
it is, in fact, you.)
green & filtered slopes furling outward
down seaward on inside out as a kiss.
once torn mouth, apples & ants,
settled stone, silt & solitude.
all the girl could gesture in flight while sands move
forwarding motions of waves in a hand imagining no
more war--no, no, no, she caws with a crow,
& just these final moments traipsing seaside,
an oyster bed & red rose
where all birds muster & flutter forth
in praise of no one or one thing.
***
there were days on the river when we were
floating in the rafts of a book.
***
whoever has ears to hear let him hear
—a one-eyed boy speaking in a mute girl’s unspoken mouth,
the memory of bees toward eves of harboring boats.
birch& bare field.
a stumbling girl & awkward boy in woods;
silver fish set forth on the chopping block.
***
…or wings of ostrich and all you ever wanted to be.
say now, i don’t know.
—& i came to learn the source of their wandering.
who speaking in an unseen evening?
—a sky & four horses& vast mountainside,
toy trains, and everything for you:
just for you. wood toy capital of the word,
—walking into you there was only an echo,
crossings across ravage & lizard tracks.
***
what country are we in now?
she hums, a boy enters water,
pieces of prayer on matchsticks, the girl whispers in his ear,
toys are a scene seen everywhere, always.
hooray.
***
taking no thought from morning until evening
i was walking in figures
by bay & no more
turn aside.
this the place we have arrived in.
ghosts and monks in greenside over there--
(where?)
& windows of huts & curious rooms
keeping watch over this place
of no more vanishing.
a good thing, too.
***
that gorge surrounded by river & sea
& mist.
original face--
entering the gap between where thought appears;
for three days he circled it,
reciting from the yangtze basin to the bosphorus & on
the trail of a nun to the caves at summit.
go on.
—who chose this face for me?
a monastic field within an eye where all roads gather.
***
or the leafing of pine & oak hovering
below an eye: you make eyes in place of an eye?
—while being lived we came to you early one morning…
& finely-veined stairs of a pagoda where the dead
leave their bodies before floating upward & visible in
bamboo wall of fish & dragon paintings’
final departure.
—a small boat in an eddy,
we saw a face & tale telling itself of no abode.
***
tripping over a father’s coat and three sticks of incense,
a boy smoked loose tobacco from the pocket & lit
a stubbed candle at the foot of a toy wooden soldier.
The ghost of a hermit-nun
wisped up beside him in tattered gray robes.
—the nothing that is not longer separate here.
he offered one incense for his mother & the other
two for his father & brother.
—no longer or other or of imagined thing in trees.
where we go is good enough by me.
love’s final mystery.
***
the boy turned angling through tall fern,
and the ghostwoman pointed toward a track
of language a mute girl left scattered on the side
of a road a 1000 years before.
—you see her standing by a transistor radio and a red scooter.
but if we are dead and our world is finished,
how is it her voice still exists, he asks?
***
if not in this, who?
tunneling into the back of a hand & a circus master’s
quarters, whispers under bridge & a central blood
line narrative of red earth.
—both ways of a road appear?
not a thing or sentence but what we have become.
you could say that.
—story & breath, two figures pausing to read by a sea.
& by the way: magnolia now to his left;
those bushy yellow flowers of osmanthus
to the right of albino deer.
a one-eyed boy’s green lizard
crawls across the girl’s diary.
***
so you discovered the beginning &
you inquire about the end?
it was a final hour under elm & honeysuckle.
—you are not dead,
the ghostwoman calls out at dawn, and in this way
we arrive back at the beginning--
and resume the work.
***
my mouth will not at all be capable.
a girl hears the fish speaking & guesses it is the hour
stroking a bruise over his mouth.
***
a hand turned outward & our drunken sister’s wandering--
a sheer apple, black butterfly & spoken grass,
melon on a wooden table: dragoman taking you
into black water eddies along a cradle (our ghost sung them yes she did).
the way we tethered inside a mother’s passing years later.
—you were between deaths,
reading from the book of events.
ears populated in pages & sandpipers all up & down shore.
always half-open, his eye.
—a boy shed her exhale a final breath & now another
sequel to the astonished.
but where now?
—stars plunging over horizon. moments.
yet you have been here before.
***
signals& signs & bluebirds & lines, porcupines & pines,
homeless (again) reading backwards from a railroad station,
—bye bye, papa--
while brushing aside.
—you thought this was a secret of your own life,
& so it is so: mixing up the table of contents wherever he walked.
not quite ready for a game of hide & seek, the girl in a stream under cormorant in search of a tune.
whose wound?
***
suitcases& stairs going toward squirrels & bears, alphabets of tea & leaf--
& all this for you.
who smells the workings of a fabulous world?
that’s a good question.
becoming passers-by & figs from thistles
& grapes from thorns.
***
a girl becoming a passage?
—in the other ear, yes--
the sound of her muteness
when she said i love you.
a mother glancing back & forth in all these roadside
exaltations.
popcorn& coca colas at the movies tonight.
no commercials?
right you are.
a handless monk saying—awesome curl of her toe into a weeping willow, not unlike
this, (look) to a boy in flight through burning bees.
***
i was looking for my father, the boys says.
and all of this time, here you are.
***
some ghosts seem skittish around here.
blind men crossing blindman’s bluff.
(a father leaning when i saw him at a final
station waving good-bye.)
an albino deer at the edge of a highway.
a mute girl carrying strawberries along the tracks.
radio o radio.
coaxing silence out of noiseless weeds.
(you better cut that.)
—& no one lights a lamp & puts it under a bushel,
it was winter & we received a sky.
what else did she say?
—a wandering girl in a plaid skirt playing hip hop
on the skin of a drum.
***
words& redbirds keep & giving you the slip?
beings & non beings of noon & obliterated beauty
awake & awaiting & arriving on a cypress stump.
they (who now?) changed the names of a story
because this is only no death:
silt at stream bottom, the boy’s empty tin can
dancing & ablutions on shore.
layer & layer of weed & dirt & faces washed in cloud & camp light.
what else?
we are only our own dream, she tells him--
a movie on a slow-moving train in a show of white geese descending on grassy banks.
(and even the dream is more than dreaming.)
***
you’re confused, perhaps that’s it?
only so that his eyes will not be broken.
—all your life you had waited;
& acorns fallen by questions, what a field
might dream in others;
—already in the wound, yes;
a study of seeing & a one-eyed boy going into whistles
not hearing minarets hearing now,
(still here, to hear, an unending quiet);
& dialogues too of sun in morning sun
—good talks with the dead--
when he finds he will be troubled—hey there,
you, and our last unsayings waking a body:
(the book of the unwritten, it is time
to return it. you are not it
it is, in fact, you.)
green & filtered slopes furling outward
down seaward on inside out as a kiss.
once torn mouth, apples & ants,
settled stone, silt & solitude.
all the girl could gesture in flight while sands move
forwarding motions of waves in a hand imagining no
more war--no, no, no, she caws with a crow,
& just these final moments traipsing seaside,
an oyster bed & red rose
where all birds muster & flutter forth
in praise of no one or one thing.
***
there were days on the river when we were
floating in the rafts of a book.
***
whoever has ears to hear let him hear
—a one-eyed boy speaking in a mute girl’s unspoken mouth,
the memory of bees toward eves of harboring boats.
birch& bare field.
a stumbling girl & awkward boy in woods;
silver fish set forth on the chopping block.
***
…or wings of ostrich and all you ever wanted to be.
say now, i don’t know.
—& i came to learn the source of their wandering.
who speaking in an unseen evening?
—a sky & four horses& vast mountainside,
toy trains, and everything for you:
just for you. wood toy capital of the word,
—walking into you there was only an echo,
crossings across ravage & lizard tracks.
***
what country are we in now?
she hums, a boy enters water,
pieces of prayer on matchsticks, the girl whispers in his ear,
toys are a scene seen everywhere, always.
hooray.
***
taking no thought from morning until evening
i was walking in figures
by bay & no more
turn aside.
this the place we have arrived in.
ghosts and monks in greenside over there--
(where?)
& windows of huts & curious rooms
keeping watch over this place
of no more vanishing.
a good thing, too.
***
that gorge surrounded by river & sea
& mist.
original face--
entering the gap between where thought appears;
for three days he circled it,
reciting from the yangtze basin to the bosphorus & on
the trail of a nun to the caves at summit.
go on.
—who chose this face for me?
a monastic field within an eye where all roads gather.
***
or the leafing of pine & oak hovering
below an eye: you make eyes in place of an eye?
—while being lived we came to you early one morning…
& finely-veined stairs of a pagoda where the dead
leave their bodies before floating upward & visible in
bamboo wall of fish & dragon paintings’
final departure.
—a small boat in an eddy,
we saw a face & tale telling itself of no abode.
***
tripping over a father’s coat and three sticks of incense,
a boy smoked loose tobacco from the pocket & lit
a stubbed candle at the foot of a toy wooden soldier.
The ghost of a hermit-nun
wisped up beside him in tattered gray robes.
—the nothing that is not longer separate here.
he offered one incense for his mother & the other
two for his father & brother.
—no longer or other or of imagined thing in trees.
where we go is good enough by me.
love’s final mystery.
***
the boy turned angling through tall fern,
and the ghostwoman pointed toward a track
of language a mute girl left scattered on the side
of a road a 1000 years before.
—you see her standing by a transistor radio and a red scooter.
but if we are dead and our world is finished,
how is it her voice still exists, he asks?
***
if not in this, who?
tunneling into the back of a hand & a circus master’s
quarters, whispers under bridge & a central blood
line narrative of red earth.
—both ways of a road appear?
not a thing or sentence but what we have become.
you could say that.
—story & breath, two figures pausing to read by a sea.
& by the way: magnolia now to his left;
those bushy yellow flowers of osmanthus
to the right of albino deer.
a one-eyed boy’s green lizard
crawls across the girl’s diary.
***
so you discovered the beginning &
you inquire about the end?
it was a final hour under elm & honeysuckle.
—you are not dead,
the ghostwoman calls out at dawn, and in this way
we arrive back at the beginning--
and resume the work.
***
my mouth will not at all be capable.
a girl hears the fish speaking & guesses it is the hour
stroking a bruise over his mouth.
***
a hand turned outward & our drunken sister’s wandering--
a sheer apple, black butterfly & spoken grass,
melon on a wooden table: dragoman taking you
into black water eddies along a cradle (our ghost sung them yes she did).
the way we tethered inside a mother’s passing years later.
—you were between deaths,
reading from the book of events.
ears populated in pages & sandpipers all up & down shore.
always half-open, his eye.
—a boy shed her exhale a final breath & now another
sequel to the astonished.
but where now?
—stars plunging over horizon. moments.
yet you have been here before.
***
signals& signs & bluebirds & lines, porcupines & pines,
homeless (again) reading backwards from a railroad station,
—bye bye, papa--
while brushing aside.
—you thought this was a secret of your own life,
& so it is so: mixing up the table of contents wherever he walked.
not quite ready for a game of hide & seek, the girl in a stream under cormorant in search of a tune.
whose wound?
***
suitcases& stairs going toward squirrels & bears, alphabets of tea & leaf--
& all this for you.
who smells the workings of a fabulous world?
that’s a good question.
becoming passers-by & figs from thistles
& grapes from thorns.
***
a girl becoming a passage?
—in the other ear, yes--
the sound of her muteness
when she said i love you.
a mother glancing back & forth in all these roadside
exaltations.
popcorn& coca colas at the movies tonight.
no commercials?
right you are.
a handless monk saying—awesome curl of her toe into a weeping willow, not unlike
this, (look) to a boy in flight through burning bees.
***
i was looking for my father, the boys says.
and all of this time, here you are.
***
some ghosts seem skittish around here.
blind men crossing blindman’s bluff.
(a father leaning when i saw him at a final
station waving good-bye.)
an albino deer at the edge of a highway.
a mute girl carrying strawberries along the tracks.
radio o radio.
coaxing silence out of noiseless weeds.
(you better cut that.)
—& no one lights a lamp & puts it under a bushel,
it was winter & we received a sky.
what else did she say?
—a wandering girl in a plaid skirt playing hip hop
on the skin of a drum.
***
words& redbirds keep & giving you the slip?
beings & non beings of noon & obliterated beauty
awake & awaiting & arriving on a cypress stump.
they (who now?) changed the names of a story
because this is only no death:
silt at stream bottom, the boy’s empty tin can
dancing & ablutions on shore.
layer & layer of weed & dirt & faces washed in cloud & camp light.
what else?
we are only our own dream, she tells him--
a movie on a slow-moving train in a show of white geese descending on grassy banks.
(and even the dream is more than dreaming.)
***
you’re confused, perhaps that’s it?
only so that his eyes will not be broken.