An Eclipse in October
       

Men working on the street
call to each other
above the noise of jackhammers

breaking the pavement apart,
breaking the earth apart, while a squirrel
leaps into the highest branch

of an ash tree: the rat's shape made aerial,
a sweep of plumed tail, tree-dweller
translated from earth to air.

Huddled images
swirl in the mind like October leaves,
swept down into the gutters,

with the card of a woman who calls herself
A Change Agent, promising to solve
even the most intractable problems:

she'll change your life
if you can afford her fee.
But who will quiet the turmoil

in the mind, the disparaging voices
come into their full power now?
The self, too, a kind of sun,

now darkens in eclipse. Upon the actual sky,
the moon advances, the jade tree
in my living room grows pale,

eaten by sucking insects
no amount of cotton swabbed in alcohol
can finally remove. Yesterday

I dreamed of myself
as a tree with no leaves,
all its branches cut off,

raw wood. The sky moves
its intricate machineries into place.
A dog lifts its shaggy head,

a hound ready to mourn the changes of the moon,
and speechless, a man looks on,
a man with grey eyes

watching the wounded sky
and the wounded earth beneath,
the twisting markers of the clouds.

A little cluster of houses grips the shore,
the birds, alarmed, fly off
with their chitter of wings,

the warbles and squawks
give way to silence, the dark passage
that is required.

The eclipse proceeds,
noon bleeds into water, in the desert
a snake sloughs its colorless skin

and ants carry it away, piece by piece,
mottle by mottle, each separate rattle,
dismantle the diamond tattoo.

In the locked ward, the heaped body
cannot speak, the hands spelling out
the language of the difficult hour

trapped in the dark
of its own history. And yet
a sliver of light descends,

breaking apart the bars
like a new life, nameless yet,
fermented in the cyclotron

by endless breaking apart.
In Madagascar, demon dancers
drive back the eclipse with their brilliant leaping into air,

the cicatrix of their red masks, grotesque, distorted,
but what is needed here. Astronomers
calibrate the lost minutes of the sun,

the moment of totality
before the moon withdraws. The self
has no such assurances,

its darkening might go on forever,
an irreversible decline. But I remember,
beyond the dream of words,

a dream in which the light is gold
that surrounds all things, the dark wood
finely carved, a bank of cabinets

in which the parts of the mind
might be set in order. On the museum wall,
a painted madonna, her blue dress

hemmed with golden notes,
a literal song. Do you hear the doctor coming
with his instruments of healing?

And on the plains of the lost America,
the song of the Ghost Dance stirring,
the Indians rising, in joy, to receive it,

that spirit they have awaited for years.
Music plays upon the self,
the lost instrument, in the shadows

where the true word gathers. In arbors,
dry scuppernong climbs, the crushed grapes
yielding such exuberant harvest,

a ferment of sweetness. Fields of kudzu
stop the erosion of the riverbank,
the Mississippi at Vicksburg,

that delirious vine,
growing through the old slave cabins overnight,
shattering the dark cradle.

Rapt, against the true north, auroras play,
glimmer their mad greens, and brief,
shimmer like a fever, passing,

an aura for the earth, a light mantle,
as in the welder's glass, I see the sun,
its white corona streaming forth

against the echoing black.

Tweet
Copyright © 2022 Claudia Buckholts All rights reserved
from Twelve Mile Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission