Richard Lyon "Winter Rows"

Richard Lyons

The emotional nature of music is to seek out the beginning & exhaust all change.

Hsun Tzu

The flame inside my loneliness, newly minted,
is as hot as the headlamp of an oncoming train.

At night it's the moon I check my face in
to see how much less of me there is,

debts like protheses hanging in the trees.
I keep mentioning the blown leaves, the falling sticks.

Are these my tongues? Strips of bark in the mud like fins.
Are names assignable, the dandruff pecan, the douglas fir?

Winter exposes its bright phallus to the whittled pines.
It's the longing to say exactly where I am, without words,

these soft blown black shells, the unbreathable air.
Here, no one wants the secret of my nakedness.

Even Voltaire knew a nation is no one's business.
Tamp the ground fog. Kiss the unsyllables dry hair.

A monk's cell cools a cracked tan bowl & a missal.

Overhead, the sun boils its egg,
guilty for everyone it's encouraged, pulling them like scavengers

into a world that won't satisfy. Why stand beneath
the rose chapel-window where everything escapes?

An olive tree ghosts its rosary along the top of the wall.
Only now does the light yield what no one wants, what exactly it is.

A red trumpet blossom climbs the gatepost.

The ground rose some from the asphalt, prickly pear
on their sides like expiring fish.

There was no house, not even a broken fence
(a single bright red cactus blossom, maybe, I'm not sure)

but I've always assumed a visible line where the land
returned to brush. The view widened at that very spot,

and I drove on, not making much of the picture my mind snapped,
another photograph. If I were to say this is where my mind went

fifteen and a half minutes after a beautiful woman said
she did not wish to see me anymore, would you believe it,

and, if you will, then maybe this is recovery, years late,
of what fared out on the tandem tightrope of my sight.

III

To the left, an orchard rose steeply from the road,
the light having gone away everywhere.

We didn't climb, I don't even remember who I was with.
I'd say we travel alone no matter how many pile in

if that didn't sound so stupid right here on the page.
We spilled a thermos on the fender of the car,

"cracked it, I want to say, but it's more round than that,
the way the person I can't remember becomes hands

cupped around steam. To the right, the land fell away to trees
&, beyond that, a greenhouse between curves of earth.

Beneath its silver edges tingling in wind, every word I'd ever spoke
blew up in my face, large hands warding something off.

Where nothing happened nor will happen,
I climb a slow gravel rise as I would childhood itself, one leg at a time,

slate chips slipping beneath my feet, pools of rain cupped to my lips.
The sky & the clouds keep my glance from lifting.

A cathedral barn, its roof like a purse seine,
its sides like Turkish papyrus craving pigment,

I go close enough it doesn't fall, the leaves tip-to-tail
like the electric spark of silent cowbells,

the dip & sway of buoy-bells farther in the blood.
As a needle that won't sew things up, a ringtail dove

eye-holes the sky, each raindrop knowing its cut.

The sun, a white boulder in a white boulder field,
noon's stone in my baggy pocket,

a canteen of thaw strapped to the other hip,
I spring, pushing off from the boulder that would keep me,

the thin red cringe of muscle in my legs.
A black moth with white spots gets out of the way.

VII

Night in an indifferent country, snow dropping thick,
I walk uphill, after drinking a glass of beer with a slice of lemon.

Morning is white thirst. Downhill in tree-blaze,
I cross a stream that bubbles ice up, silver, in the shape of a braid.

I stand there still.

Tables of Content

Seventeen (Fall 2003) Sixteen (Spring 2003)

Fifteen (Fall 2002) Fourteen (Spring 2002)

Thirteen (Fall 2001) Twelve (Spring 2001)

Eleven (Fall 2000) Ten (Spring 2000)