His face is pale charcoal.
The flesh lush as river clay, porous
as leaves dripping in an undiscovered forest.
When he holds you—if he holds you—
you will know not whether he will keep you
there between his palms forever—
a bird lost in a lightless cave—
or whether warmth is really what he has to give.
As if he felt, in a place not called a soul,
your wind-chilled voice, the way you tried
to steady your hands, and he wanted to pluck
all the threads of coldness from your veins,
and knowing he could not,
decided, instead, not to let you die there—
an animal known to falter, quietly, on stones,
an animal spent of speech, trembling, quietly, on stones.
In the Colorado mountains, Birdsong,
near Pike’s peak west of The Springs, Deloria and I drove
a dark blue Buick under a tunnel gouged in granite.
Snow covered the brick red surface, and a small breath of wind
lifted tufts of snow. It was quiet enough to make my lungs gasp.
From the ridge we could see the town below,
and the lands stomped deep in boot prints,
and where decades of winter had grayed everything.
I think we better leave, Deloria said,
and since neither of us trembled lip for the last hour,
I almost believed he hadn’t said anything. The single
sound of the cliff a branch scraping in wind across the road.
I.
I’m having trouble voicing this story, Birdsong.
Often or even closer to always I try to remember
what happened, and whether the narrative
unraveled how I recall, or only to Deloria, or myself.
Whether we are all of us in the middle of this myth.
Not you, and me, and the other, but all all of us—
the soil, and roots, and sparrow bones—
though that last part, like I am trying to tell you,
may be William speaking. There was a day
I yelled my name in a dark tunnel beneath an overpass
and echoing back, I couldn’t distinguish whose voice, if any.
II.
I awakened, Birdsong, dry of tongue and in a tin sweat.
I was screaming at the girl sleeping next to me whose eyes,
you’ll have to see this to believe me, are different shades of brown.
Floating by my window in a black mass, a swarm of stone bees,
Deloria offered his palms, and his pupils, for the first time,
lit blue where the kerosene valve thinned the flames.
This is not something the girl was ready for.
So when I touched her, and she would not move, I screamed again—
Tell me what is at the window. I know you see him.
Set those sleeping eyes, I am paraphrasing here, to emergence
and admit whose voice is there to fill you.
Eventually, I had to turn the lights on on the whole situation.
To flip the switch, the lantern above bright enough
to blind, and cast Deloria into the forest where his wick
would shorten, barely visible, and burning white.
III.
Today, Birdsong, my friends told me
I am not allowed to quote you
in a poem and in fact am not permitted to quote any poets
or mention any of your names in my work.
I told them this conversation was a quotation of Birdsong.
We couldn’t talk about him without quoting
the things he’d already said, and thought, and even written.
But William, they said, because they are always mistaken,
wouldn’t you rather be the window than the mirror?
I told them they didn’t understand, and why don’t we admit
we couldn’t get around you or your work.
If I tried there would be in the middle of my poems a big white hole.
A big fucking chunk of solar absence
as if there was a rock lodged in my throat words broke around.
We didn’t leave, you see, because I got angry, on the best of terms,
and while I walked home, I noticed your face, a caught bird,
lingering behind the reflection of mountains on my window.
Jesse DeLong is an MFA candiate at the University of Alabama. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Illya's Honey, and Poetry Quarterly.
THE NEW
RULES OF
W R I T I N G
ISSUE:
S P R I N G
2011
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