October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Be steady in the fire-river of scholarship and the dead will hear. Life and death, photographic negative, photographic positive. Some daughters live; some were alive and are now memories, but the configuration of them touches an eternity. In the wild, we all love in unison. The snowstorm like shredded coconut has hit the city. In this moment, we hear a word from Sibyl. She has a formula in mind to stop the clock. She and Heather share these rich understandings. I shall write them down in this English of mine and find a great home in my unnamed need.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
In ordinary language there is fracturing we can hear, serious dischord in the lyre, like hammering that makes gold foil. It will be a lasting name in the moon, in the paint-by-enamel autumn, that shall tarnish the memory. Close your eyes, move about in the real, and pass your days blessed and wrapped up with chimes. The clock of your life has brass all over it even as your sundial stands in the cold wind. You could denote the breakdown of good days and be the answerer standing on the edge of your blood, merely writing of trees.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Silence requires effort, an effort to give mystical language a musical intelligence. We’ll go bathe in the Hungarian woods where there are unisons in the branches. We are one thing the cosmos is doing in the heat and solidity of this moment. All sentences end, and you can’t stop the clock, not even for Heather. Shall I write this down, that I have thought of trying to hammer words into posterity, enchantments of rhythm and your nearness, a root sound, a detonation in song, a penny falling from the clouds? How black and Protestant is my autumn–moving, intrinsically Cherokee.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
The silence of the snow is as mystical as our daughter, who lives for the woods and her words and sentences. Her voice is a lyre. She lives in each sentence and has found the rhythm of rivers, perhaps even the sound of butterflies, those very children of heaven that crown a meadow’s greenery. Sound off now, every corner of nature, for her–Cassie. Who has painted. The entire forest. With touches and smiles. Create glittering music every morning to soothe the troubles that bury us in treble-tarnish. Sit with me at the edge where heat is concealed, Cassandra.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Torrential–in the branches–time comes down, and Sibyl can’t stop the clock. Every word that Heather speaks she wants to hear before leaving the world. Nothingness enchants nothing. Show her the roots of your sound, Heather. Let your dense coronation ring–go to the sundial and redial it, find sundown’s second down. Enter with your heart’s chords the universal orchard universal in violet. Something is blackening over the rainbow, perhaps it is a rock fracture in the mountains. And so you will hate to listen to the blood’s sea-shadow. You run away to sea and I to tea.
October 2000 | back-issues, poetry, William B. Hunt
Sibyl I do remember when your heart was concealed and your blood glittered through my constitution as each evening broke down. And I am listening for new music from your snow-white imagination, strength-giving and searing. Tell me anything but farewell, let us not indulge in violence, reach to me out of the dust that underscores the aria at my stylus. Oh, deadly water-shadows, there is a spider in the night sky when I only want to place a hot chocolate cup in the hand of Sibyl. Hold it steadily now, Sibyl; in deepest old age, with trembling.
