CONJUNCTIONS:32 Spring 1999 From Such Rich Hour Cole Swensen --with images from Les Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, fifteenth century, computer manipulated by the author

MARCH 1           (Thus we find triads: dimension, form, and order substance, nature, power                                        and took (all three brothers                                                        or was it the single other?) every care and every caution: green infused with grey             indicates               a cult of weather were you born here were you born vassal, slave, your only master with the fingers of a weaver tied back the finite branches with the fingers of a lover let the seed sift through his fingers who so thereafter lived here. A small dog running up to the road in front of a flock of sheep in front of a large man carrying something (we can't see what) (sheaf) (shearing) holding (soft) against him (close). May 1, 1410, 1 A.M.: LES REVENANTS                Old and on / certain nights of the Walpurgis             I saw it                                                                                         coming                                                                                         back                                                               a thing that lives                                         on bridges                suspended "...for centuries were the exclusive privilege of the very wealthy        and of saints." Forgive my apprehension it stood on a bridge slightly swaying, vagary of wind, tracery of sound that could have been wind                                                                    carved. And refused to leave. "Here lives                what I did and cannot stop doing "Then suddenly by the 11th or 12th century, they were all over, sometimes alone, sometimes in great numbers, at first largely in dreams, but soon not so confined."          (came back to us)              (and I thought I saw)       (as he was                                                      then                                                      the army of the dead, they called it Maisnie Hellequin--soldiers, children, women, saints, by the thousands with all their attributes on The moral was blatant ("there they go, paying") but we were too distracted by their faces, how they hadn't changed at all and were          more similar and were                                                                         the precision there,                                                                         the choice. MAY 30, 1427: JEANNE-NOT-YET-SAINT WITH SHEEP When they eat from your hand it's said that you're saved           or that you saved them.    You can never be sure.                                               What you heard.             What did And how          do you know it was Saints She and Her?                                            And which them?                                            And will you agree to the musical score. We ask you to close your eyes and picture: it's night (held close, black & white). Campfires, men in armor, the army at the gate.        and we haven't even begun to consider what we really mean by mad. If it approaches. Seeing vs. seen. And will make of it a king.                            We ask you to picture men huddled around fire. There was so much less light then. And        it glinted their armored bodies into black bodies of water. The way things move in        uncertain light is not to be discounted. A touch with the tip of a finger or an otherwise sleeping forehead, between        the eyebrows and up about half an inch. What would you give. JUNE 1 Sickle one, scythe two and sweep and sheaf and sign in the rocking field and the river whole in its own          (what hold                           what                           boat of the errance of a spire (despite appearance                          it's miles (at the door of the river) (that curves into harvest Choir: Let us           harbor in this witness                                                   a man                       with an oar shreds a surface (at the door he calls a river) a person slipping inward                        How stone reigns                        How hay stings                        (How swing this scythe so I look a little less like                                                                       my own death) who                                                                  sings                                                              of of all the towers on the castle, three are red. What are they carrying in the boat? (List everything you could carry away in a boat.) OCTOBER 1, 1445 How to paint a filament designed to be invisible: How to paint a white dog against a white wall: How a world in stages, striated, calibrated: first you notice the person walking, the river that occupies the center of the picture, the three boats and the one man, arms raised, something hard in his hand. Such a busy world ruled by birds, held down by a stone, and what is--just behind and to the right of the first tower on the left--the moon that looks like a planet of skies against the sky and how do we live there and how do we live on air. Executed 1440-1450, after shadows had been invented, and reflections, and lives on water, and is made of light or of its slight absence.

More poems from Such Rich Hour can be found in Conjunctions:32, Eye to Eye