An Ordinary Evening in Oklahoma City

                       In memoriam, Gary Rader (1946–2017)

I

The eye’s plain vision is not what it sees, 
or what it understands, or even what
it ignores, but what it passes over,

like an angel among the mountains, an angel 
above the entrance, retinal, peripheral, both 
seen and unseen, dark things without a double,

without shadow. Landscape is another
kind of language, one we never learn to speak 
but know the way we know our own skin,

our own tongue, the way it runs along our 
teeth, an action for which there is no word, 
only recognition, even though vocabulary

is a formula for knowing. Everything 
is foreign without a word beneath it, 
rooted and routed, downspringing

and upshooting, guttural, subliminal, 
like a sentence planted both in sky and 
earth, neither wholly written nor erased.

II

Suppose this life is nothing more than a 
house on fire, who would pray for rain? 
Rain on the church bells, on the trees, in

the yard, the children running up 
the hills, the rivers and rivulets, 
the blue and gray of the bluegray

day, as real and mutable as our 
thoughts about them, this one and 
that one, the match of the mind,

the fire of the idea not even 
darkness can extinguish, not 
cessation, the implacable

meditation, our scorched and 
sonorous laments, the smokespool 
of regret, like a log at our feet.

You know the syllables. 
You have tasted the letters.
Sing the song as you swing the ax.

III

The point where the horizon ends and 
begins is the same, but not our ideas 
about them, or us, always ending,

always beginning, like this line, 
and the next, this one too, as in a 
shoreline or the cloud ponderous

above it, churning, turbulent as a 
heart, the oar of desire alone on 
the raft, the waves white as

castles of the dead, bone breached, 
black ladled, their presence as real 
as contemplation, real as the

realest real, beyond sight, beyond the 
memory of sight, which is now beyond 
wanting or even knowing of want,

where that last long light of emptiness, 
that flicker, that flame, that solitary space, 
that crack, that cleft, that fissure is filled.

IV

The end of one person is not necessarily 
the beginning of another. When a thing 
stops, something else may not begin.

Or it may, as the sun in its last self
may make of us a reflection of the stars 
in their sacks of black. What shines in

your skin, first one? What lays its teeth
in your bones? The plainness of the plains 
is savagery, the farmer says. So be it. So be

our blindness in the face of pure sight. 
What do our bones know of the oven 
that bears them back to the bodiless

body of the unushered air? What of 
formulation and fixity? What of 
flesh? Of the father and the son?

Of the sun? Of the stars and their shimmer 
on the son in the raw reflection of reality?
What sees beyond shadow, beyond silence?

V

Our romance with the celestial is like 
an X and a Y in a sentence composed 
not of letters but of what letters used

to signify. Those two romanzas, the
said and the unsaid, ghosts of our regrets. 
The heavens have always been haunted,

and yet we dress them like ourselves 
in a play in which we are the gods 
acting as humans acting as gods.

One cannot unfell the fallen tree, 
one cannot un-understand this. 
Not even the president, Mr. Blank,

strong mind in a strong land. The poem 
is neither mind nor land, neither the 
arrow nor the bow, neither the sun nor

the self. It is more like the barren limbs
of the trees after the leaves have loosened,
the silent summer gone, the ghosts glistening.

VI

Barrenness is not absence, but absence 
is everywhere. My father is absent.
There is a hole somewhere in Oklahoma City

the size of something not quite right. If 
Oklahoma City is part absence, what is 
present? If the sun makes the silent sky scatter

like deer in the blue brush, what bringeth 
the moon? Star ghosts whiten the night with 
their disappearances as we will with ours.

My father’s bones have begun their heavy
work, learning their trade, perhaps from Stevens’.
The shared labor of the dead. The earth’s

bowl fills, empties, then fills again. Inside
the mind, the words we want wait to do their 
own work. The philosopher waits, the president

waits, the poet waits. For our fathers? Our sons? 
Our words? Our love? Our ghosts? The son waits, 
while sun, the stars, the sea, the sky, the soil, opens.

Read more from Issue 20.1.