1993 Poem – David Radavich

by David Radavich

St. Charles, West Alton, Davenport
the names flood past
like the roofs of houses

arched and powerless
This is the reverse
of purification, cleansing,

everything filmed
in cisterns
After the quick, brandishing skies,
the slow creep up
the marooned wallboards

we watch
yet cannot see
Romance gives way
to railroad ties, barges,
débris, sandbags, cloacal flux,
trees stuck

like broccoli
in that muddy sauce
The ache of every bed, chair,
appliance, desk, books
that normally
frisk and run now

bound in place like
Antaeus, prisoner of the earth,
in water, anchoring water
This slow, lapping reaching
makes immobile even

the eyes
rapt, staring
dry as summer bone
Standing at the cliff’s edge
secure in ideology

we confront: Passion
The Father of Rivers
makes us all children again,

asking for lessons,
begging for our place

to be sheltered,

being turned back
from the knee
to our own pain and path
Is there any other way
to know streamings of mind,

terrors that
spill out
visibly

in torrents above
below

crawlings
the pace of fear

clutching our ankles,
our own dragging demons?
Not just water
but all our obsessions

pour out,
take over the land:

Protect us, governments, God,
return us to our lives

without residue,

without anxiety, sludge,

the life we knew
we want
returned unscathed, insured
That crazy Rain Dance
must have worked its charm,

we were athirst
twirling like crazy,

searching for deliverance
from the dry days,

desert of our century’s dying end
Mirages fired
the mind

I remember
when I saw you, mountains
of the southwest,

Mexico, blue and dry,
hazy in the heat
of distance,

long dry road as
far from here as Jupiter
How could life be otherwise
but an ark in pairs

poems, parasols, plastic bottles,
all the paraphernalia

of ourselves
floating downstream
like a dream

before us
Our history floats by
awful in its diuretic honesty
Let us not forget
locality,
the individual human face
stolen into pain,

life’s photographs
eroded and disfigured
Wrong bird
hiding out in the wrong nest,
wrong tree, even nature
is confused

O waters gathering
high and low

surrounding and imprisoning,

bring our leavings
right
before us,

century of greed
and waste
Carry out our baggage,
empty sins,

hubris
and despoilment
into

the Mouth of Life,

source of ends
beginnings
the wide claiming sea.