In a pasture of the Milky Way where the Little Pigeon glides down over the dark rocks of Tennessee, a man has landed on his belly, drinking water from a cup made of hands, wrinkled olive skin, hair black as the soil of eternity, swept back and tied with ryegrass, listening down the mountain for the dull heartbeat of troops, for miners jingling through the trees toward the goldfields of Dahlonega. As a child he could conceal his body so easily behind a single stone, behind even the petal of a cornflower! He learned, To be whole be each part of the whole. In this way the body cannot suffer in death, in the ocean-that-drinks-men, but only grow more peaceful, like a sparrow in the throat of a blacksnake, wet and half-alive, wings folded lightly against the breast, flying downward through the rosy coils of home.
This poem is from Stephen Knauth’s Night-Fishing on Irish Buffalo Creek, Ithaca House, 1982.
— Ed.
