by James Ragan

LUSIONS

In the laugh belly of too little thought,
a lusion is eating up the mind
for nothing. It needs no compensation
for the distance it will travel or the time
it takes to eat the hum of reason
out of tongues. It is only the brief

nuisance of its love for laughter
that keeps the mind whole.
In the laugh belly of our prehistoric skulls,
lusions like tumors in the brain
grow secret terrors into what is taught.
Each day our hunger turns to silence,
we lose another thought.

(from LUSIONS, Grove/Atlantic)

SISYPHUS BLIND

A face that toils so close to stones
is already stone itself.
– Albert Camus

I have imagined him always blind,
pushing stone until the hill capsizes,
and the walk back down
becomes the walk back up,
each step, a shock, a touch of air,
on course in case a passer-by
leans into his world of local forms.

He stops. I barely brush his arms
before his eyes stare down,
calculating distance as I pass.
We are not far from breathing.
We suffocate only in the lungs
and curse each other, doubled up, tongues
dried by the dust our shoe-flaps make.

Only night deceives us. Its landscape
trails the moon, shifting sky to cut us down
where we sit. We feel the shattering underfoot
the rock carving paths into our flesh.
How willingly we fall into each other’s cry.
We dream, eye to eye, one suicide.

I try to think his stare awake, to rise
above the ash of moonstone, to feel his shoes,
dust lifting around them. Nothing remains,
only rock, his moon-struck face.
I am whatever stone breathes, a blind man
pounding air to escape the universe
like a meteor burning up space.

(from IN THE TALKING HOURS, USC Figueroa Press)

SHOULDERING THE WORLD

When I was young and hurried
and had no words to climb,
but knew the trees on the wide lawn
to shimmy and skin to scrape
into soft bleedings, I would bucket down
plums and black cherries for the scrolled batter
my mother kneaded with her thumbs,
each round pan a single flat globe
of busty dough above the juiced pickings,
and when, in season, Easter currants,
flowing sap along the walnuts I had crushed,
had laid their wintered wash of gravel
on the tongue in so many freshly spun orbits,
and given song to a mind deliciously green,
only then had I learned the world
was not with me as I thought it must,
and had I noticed more the play of metal,
rolling pin, spoon, and the shell cracker
or the miniature tin wheel that crimped and beveled
crust on the ledge of the pastry pan,
I would have known what hard earning
comes with pain for the work of the thing,
that the play of one force on another,
a roller flattening thin the skin of the matted flour
or the nut cracked quick into splits of progeny,
was the child’s first true act of tending
each and every bruise the mind had buried
like a thought with the hard hammer of memory
on whose wide shoulder I carried
the terror of all the world’s cruel anguish.

(from THE WORLD SHOULDERING I, Salmon Publishing, Ireland)

THE DALAI LAMA HIDES FROM THE WORLD FOR A DAY

He hears the taut strings of Debussy
honing wind in the walls he has dug
into clay for closure. He has wept
all morning on the prayer beads of ancestors
who have visited, not in shape but in sounds
calling up their rhythms, tin-canned like the sung
soft hummings on the strings of a psaltery.
He still hears the diphthong grinds of motor-bikes
he has driven always in their cant of distance.
In his sleep a voice echoes up
a howl not unlike the bleats he has foraged
on the foothills of Hlasa, but as persistent
as a note nagging up a treble clef scale.
It is the cry of a generation
wailing through the song of terror.
It is not his ear for hearing
chaos in the perfect rounding of a circle
that he suspects, but rather peace
in the quiet of the mind’s reflection.
He would sooner leave the world
its pleasure in the seeds of tsampa
than believe devoutly in the sophistry of eyes,
that clarity is better seen through bifocals,
and vision is sublime.
For the sake of grieving, he can no longer keep
his beat with the flute’s quick measure.
It has come to hide its petty deception,
the false harmony that it plays,
romancing the cobra, hermetic, spooled in its box,
coiling to hiss the long howl of a world away.

(from THE WORLD SHOULDERING I, Salmon Publishing, Ireland)

DROPPING FUEL OVER CHINA

Let the engine’s loss of vowels begin.
Grind the tooth’s blade, now the mind’s
thin worm of denial through an ear phone.
When the steward speaks, sweep the lone
bone from the dinner plate and weep.
The last meal is light. The silk
the child down wind weaves in breath is worn.
Weep for the imagination’s useless fire,
how the moment’s fact loses what is prior,
and for the coiling smoke along the wings,
feed it water. The rotor, sleek as the Rolls
a dream could ride in, has coughed its soul
into your breathing, stuttering, losing weight.
Death will visit you in a foreign state

(from THE WORLD SHOULDERING I, Salmon Publishing, Ireland)

SOMETIMES

Sometimes, and only if one dreams
as little of snow or of crows in branches,
and more of the woman who has come
softly to you, raising a brow toward a door
behind which a child crooks an arm
above a sleeping eye, the image will turn
to aureoles of dawn: gold, rose, vermilion,
each in their own language.

Sometimes, and only if it seems
so little of the night has scuttered
back into its cup, the word, blue,
like a runner out of breath
will fade, unfurled, into a cheapjack strip
along a flag no longer striped,
and spread its satin palms, face up
into sunlight for only the sky of her smile.

And sometimes, and only in spring
a dove from the river’s soft vale of lilies
will fly as close to you as trust,
and a calm in the great reds of autumn
will, as often as you need, lie down
beside you, raising a brow you’ve known
above the eyes of the only woman
you will ever have a need to dream or touch.

(from TOO LONG A SOLITUDE, U. of Oklahoma Press)