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Sport 7: Winter 1991
♣ Eric Pankey
♣ Eric Pankey
The Rumour of Hope
1.
Bells. A fanfare of snow. The half-life
Of symmetry. The lustre and blush
Of an apple hidden in blue tissue.
A spigot. A fall of ice. Flour and cloves.
The cloven edge of a petal. Rose
But redder. Rose madder. Dissonance.
Marl and peat. A shed full of tools
That will rust this winter: shovels,
Hoes, sharp-tined rakes and leaf rakes.
Marginalia. Forgetfulness. A lack
Of charity. The collapse of the random
Into order. The crab tree's meagre bounty.
A suite of rooms. One cello going on and on.
The wind chiselling the drifts. The poor.
What, where you are, will always be with you?
2.
We live in this place of suffering and plenty,
Of music, extravagant noise, a clamour
Of reversals and margins distance distorts.
Here there are lines, intersections, and borders.
Here is light and the obstruction of light.
Here all things are endued with form
And separate from one another.
Here, without pulleys or guy wires,
The hobbled moon inches above the skyline.
An unfordable river teems with fish,
Its water a backwash near the bank.
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You left here for eremos: a wilderness,
A place without affliction or affection,
Where the absolute is absolute,
Where comfort's shape is formlessness.
3.
To live is to believe the rumour of hope.
I give you the holly's fierce ceremony,
The sound far off of diminished carols,
An angel amid columns and perspective,
(You can already sense the aromatic
Gifts, the splendour, the gold's dormancy.
What will it buy?) the inquietude,
Annunciations and visitations.
See how the branches weave a relieving arch,
How no one looks heavenward?
I give you this pastoral ruin,
This lean-to where animals are fed.
Or is it an abandoned shrine or tomb?
You see these are lean times
And the same set is used for each act of the drama.
The Continuance
Now that the day is adjourned, he returns
To routine devotion, to a knotted rosary
That is nothing more than a calendar,
The cadence and creep of a kingdom come.
It is hard to know from the evidence
If a judgement can ever be made,
If he is the one to hand down a verdict,
Or the one who stands, when asked, to hear his fate.
The herb garden, green through the warm winter,
Has been scoured by an abrupt ice storm.
The mint has gone from flower to char,
Yet by his effort (the old sheets thrown over
The garden bed each dusk) the leafless sticks
Stand in their rectitude, and the patterns—
The braids, the knots, the compass-although torn
And skeletal, maintain their once-full form.
Long ago he cut back the roses.
The earth, mounded out of necessity
Around each, is too easily compared.
A pile of dirt remains a pile of dirt.
Parable of the Empty Tomb
A dove darned cold light to morning
Within the threshold's vaulted hemisphere.
No wind rebuffed or staggered the oncoming.
In candour, a figure—an angel—shone,
Filling the emptiness of the empty tomb:
An opening, a gleaning, a circle, O,
A borrowed garden dismantled in its last hour
And left behind like needless timber—unhewn,
Useless, from which a child without tools,
Without magic, except the magic a child owns,
Puzzles together an image of a throne.