CONJUNCTIONS: A Web Exclusive

Five Poems John High

—for Andrea (again) The two remained anonymous to wind & eternal without bells the vacant monastery on an edge of sea where hermits gathered among caves & tall grass surrounding potato fields the boy yearning (this) to copy out words inside handwoven sheets of books & pages of stories some burnt others without beginning or end a girl spying up from a beach & searching the name of a brother among the dead washing her clothes still naked by mountain river running down steps from monastery walls humming as three monks & four crows a scribe crossed by foot over a wooden bridge swinging & calling down to gulls bringing more manuscripts in beaks as the woman finds her own name printed (there) in an autobiography beginning good morning worlds without end The child reading an autobiography outside the marquee where in another world she studies foreign films flickering across a white screen this movement located outside time & the sidewalk cold on her legs tonight a manuscript (the woman had found it for her) looking back in her eyes a face missing all but the last pages of a first kiss the girl recognizing there a blossoming of her own life & evening stars as migratory owls appear above the theatre ants & grasshoppers too moving south as winter again approaches the boy walking out of the deserted storefront now holding a piece of looted film called Rublev of an icon painter in the 15th century who he tells her once saved his life at the movies The kerchief around her neck & a blind boy ripening in crisp air           blue stripes her broad chin vital black birds flying over cliffs her voice invisible out here in wonder not seeking or exposed      blown bits of paper & the bell in her hand the boy studying her from the other side of rivers & ghosts of fathers appearing as she turns her thumb up ward the seagulls yes—why here—in the hills she says coming closer as the gesture refuses all refusal but this human kindness & breathing lightly (again) the boy enters the water belated wading then swimming toward us as evening arrives with the sound of a mute girl in his arms     her mouth ringing the bell from his shoulders and now he stops & stares at the wings no longer above A photograph of the boy in a bow tie on the day our language found itself in side a tired face & one eye turned toward a window where we see a clock & mistress serving as models in a story abandoned a landscape this gratitude and tender hand she places on his sore ear as words no longer of speech or coercion launch an avalanche of books scattering about a broken dining room table all the illuminations & forlorn icons & cartoons this love a concentration as a world contained within discovered a final source of desire atonement an alphabet mirroring these days and entry into pain & awakening of heart The heat of each lone fire a body no word no not existent here burning grasses & finding how we see an earth a sadness in this violence of rain and a child leaving on a boat the mute girl humming after the man i will heal you & chestnuts on a beach where in an older place no one knew our names the streets calling with this yes joy & yes destruction as we fall and leaves asleep in the fields beyond a road that goes on without sight or sound or direction □