PARALLEL
The dead are never really dead.
Their world runs parallel,
half here, half not,
a double exposure.
We box up life for our convenience,
but they come and go
on some indiscernible whim,
lean over our shoulders,
interject in conversations,
and visit their old haunts, nostalgic.
When my niece was barely three,
she saw my father in the bordering marshes,
wearing his hip high boots,
feeding the widowed swan.
Dad looked up and waved.
Katie waved back excitedly.
We told her she was wrong.
It was impossible.
But that evening we stood by the window
a long time watching.
Definition makes the world safe,
keeps it all in place;
But when we sleep, I suspect
we too break with convention,
trespass protocol and time zones
to wander about in the nebulous parallel.
Perhaps to them we seem transparent,
thin, half there, half not.
In the morning we say it was a dream,
we've been somewhere;
the places and names we can't recall,
but on the tip of our mind, something,
something ever so near, everywhere,
and gone.
Susan Dane
Copyright 2000
THE SECRET GARDEN
Men seek war
as women seek birth.
The two places where
all the merchandising stops.
The ordinary screeches to a halt.
What remains is one tenuous line
staking out the here
from there.
Here, every breath counts,
and each breath unaccounted for is pain.
Focus honed to a pin point,
the peripheral widens to full circle.
We break through the continuum
to where nothing can be counted on,
yet everything for one brief firefly yes
lives unafraid.
Hospice workers and the night nurse
know the secret too. Angel ushers,
they make their home on the razor's edge.
But all of us though unconfessed,
have had our moments in the day-to-day,
when unexpectedly the cage bars snap
or stretch like toy rubber, and we slip through
undiscovered to another view. The clatter
and the clanging suddenly gone,
and we gone too, in some surprising way.
But very there, caught up
in an unbearable fullness.
We take in the brilliant brimming, wide-eyed,
and from this other side we look back,
determined that the madness now will stop.
Then slammed home again without our asking,
where things move slow and thick like yesterday.
Counted, measured, justified, explained.
We make no mention of it in the commerce
of our day. Things slug along,
no war, no birth.
But secretly we hug the harbor in our memory. Time
and time again we struggle to return
as best we can to those quick fly song moments
when by grace remembered, we forgot the weight.
Susan Dane
Copyright 2000
LABOR
NIGHT
Her world is upside down,
waiting for the baby.
She paces in the night
and sleeps the day.
She has cleaned every corner
of the house,
rearranged things twice,
then started on the garage.
Her belly so round,
so full of grace,
she cannot feel her legs
or in between them.
All this will have to wait.
For him there is nothing
romantic in the coming.
When there's not one
more inch to spare,
one more ounce of air,
then he'll push his way
into the new world.
For now,
there is still time.
Hours will stretch
between the violent seconds.
She rises in the night,
to cook the peppers,
pops the stems and scatters seeds,
and marvels at their colors--
yellow, orange, red and green.
Christmas in the air.
But life starts with a fight,
a gritting of his will,
and single-mindedness.
Necessity, the mother of invention.
For his first breath,
he parts her bone,
slow and hard
like the resurrection,
and moving of the stone.
Susan Dane
Copyright 2000
To Preston on his 19th Birthday
ONE HAND
The sound of one hand
clapping is not silence.
It is tears.
Love wishing itself
against the closed fist.
Grace reigning a world
against its will.
The heart, a muffled beat,
in blood and flesh,
muted by the calloused will
at last grows silent.
It is the first sound.
It is the last sound.
Like boots in snow
the empty impress left behind
suggests a traveler.
"Write," it says. "Speak
to the blind busyness. Sing
in the night. The deafening night."
And when the dance subsides
there remains an echo.
Ripple on the lake's dark face.
That someone once was there,
Clapping.
Susan Dane
Copyright 2000
PERU
(Published in the Atlanta Review - Spring 2001)
If you want to hear the mountains,
do exactly as I say.
There are rules to things like this.
And I tell you that many
have come this way more than once
and have not heard them yet.
Listen:
You should leave Lima early.
The flight at five will get you there by six,
before the morning fog wraps Cuzco thick.
When that first crest of snow caps rise
you'll feel the thinness of your breath.
A quiet ache settles in the chest.
Do not stop for Indian trinkets.
Drink the coca tea and then go straight to bed.
At four you rise to start again,
this time by train.
But do not think that you are almost there.
The ride will take six hours:
the switchbacks laced with waterfalls
and clustered sheep. Sit on the left
to see the Indians wrapped in layered rainbows,
black bowler hats and braids,
spinning llama yarn outside their homes,
the wisdom of their people lost
except when kings return in dreams
and speak about the stones
At the base of Machu Pichu
there will be five hundred tourists
bursting from the train,
like subway riders in a city rush.
Step aside and let the others push.
Look up to the right
and see the cavern homes where mothers nursed,
and children scattered ants for play.
Listen to the river rushing madly to you;
listen to the rising of your own breath.
There are no other sounds.
There are no birds. No chatter here.
When you can feel the pulse beneath your feet,
then start the climb, the way you must, on foot.
You are the silent stranger coming to this time.
And all the mountains are waiting.
Through a thousands years of solitude,
they have all been pressing toward this moment,
of your coming, of your coming.
Susan Dane
Copyright 1984
SHELL
FREE
Ten thousand pecks they say
to break the shell
and wiggle free,
wide-eyes blinking.
Nothing to be done to hurry things.
It needs 10,000 pecks to build the beak.
What must it think?
At 10,000, beats
one peck at a time, blind,
until the darkness cracks
and a different air wraps its flapping
cold around it. Light dazes in
a rush of smells and greens.
Are we too breaking free bit by bit?
Certainly there is much
that closes us in
our own invisible porcelain:
the hourglass,
and sleepless nights,
and lives with sand walls sliding,
and everywhere the tight jacket
of desire keeps us wrapped
around ourselves.
Still I wonder if the metaphor itself
is not half-cracked.
The question never asked:
Are we the tiny embryo
pressing to be born?
Or is there something far unknown
fighting for its breath in us-- against us--
cramped, curled and nerve pinched,
its oxygen receding?
Are we the chick or shell?
The cage or caged?
Or does some mystery make one of two?
That with 10,000 pecks
this dark sufferer
splinters all our little hardnesses;
And then this folded over doubled thing,
crammed and squeezed,
breaks free
and when it does,
God Himself wriggles out, ever so fragile,
hesitant, still wet, but bodied!
And the mystery!
It doesn't leave us behind,
like some broken thing,
an empty shell,
but brings us on its frangible wings
to a new home,
that is precisely wild,
and we,
clumsy but unfettered,
climbing,
climbing!
Susan Dane
Copyright 2000
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