TWO POEMS
F. Daniel Rzicznek
Summer Hermitage
What use is this heart I am a harbor for? I leave a square of tall grass in the yard for the rabbits to carouse in. It is the end of the day—I want them to be happy. What once was the groan of wagons is now the shrill rumble of engines and tires: to strike the earth with every kind of plague, a war for the last bridge out of the mind. Sometimes it seems our hidden calling to be here: consume, discard, consume, eating well into the night until we're full, fools that we are with only little thoughts for where our thoughts have led and lead to. Sometimes the deaths we invent teeter above perfection: their tapestries, the heart and the million ways we've made to stop it. The sun is passing through trees, a brief clot flaring between the two green mountains that have seemed in two sluggish months to change shape and positions: winter in reverse though I can still tell each (despite my own descent) and the rough jut of each awakens when cloaked in leaves. The rains have come—the roof now leaks and I've cleared a corner near the hearth where a small pipe runs to carry the rainwater out and away, into the yard. The old pipe came from a factory where spirit toiled with machinery to build a thing of use but just one use—not the merciless river which holds behind its blueness endless uses: rocks to pave a walk, fish to hang and dry or roast above the fire. Signs of my ease: blotches from berrying on knuckles and nails, line and rod propped behind the open door, these slopes and gullies no good for farming and my mind no good for it either—rest, action, and reflection: chopping wood in fog, cutting the yard by hand, observant to each inch of land passing below me. An hour later and a troop of grackles descends to argue (hopping and swooping from swales of shade) over bits of worm and moth left by the blade. In the long patch I left untouched for no reason but to watch grow, a cat I've never seen before (black with rust-brown stripes—nearly red) flashes out at a grackle's back and fells it with a swat and a stomp, flushing its kin. So my use is known to me instantaneously. So the twilight unravels image by image: grackles still feeding though farther off, satanic cat meditating with the swart bird still as a stone between those massive paws, the mountains nearly steaming in the heat, godlike river babbling down into confusions of town and city and then—who knows, the delta, the desert, the prairie, the plains, all shimmering where their colors surface, and in the center, my heart stepping down from its bone pulpit and quaking, quaking.
One Monk
One monk cradles an armload of salt and builds a house he dies at the entrance of. One monk spends an eon collecting driftwood and walks, without looking up, toward the sound of the sea. One monk drags a dragon by the teeth and drapes him from a branch above the void. One monk stays in the same square cell and pauses on a marshy island, eluding the wolves. One monk shoulders an enormous fieldstone and his silence glows, transverses, incinerates. ~ I am but a man, breathing on a mountain and the ants crawl away, my toenails on their backs. I am but a man breathing, on a mountain and the deck of my house rocks across the moments. I am but a man: breathing on a mountain and the owls scold my lantern from their trees. I: am but a man breathing on a mountain and the Beast comes to claw me in my sleep. I am but a man breathing on a mountain and my breath nurtures death in the loch of my lungs.