from "nova cantica"

Trustees of Boston University

From "Nova Cantica"Author(s): John PeckSource: Arion, Third Series, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Fall - Winter, 1998), pp. 48-56Published by: Trustees of Boston UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20140441 .

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From Nova C?ntica

JOHN PECK

Corpus Nostrum:

as if long floating

through hooped chancels of Romanesque

radiating

from a pillared and domed

navel far under earth,

the light stone-colored?

as if steadily

opening

into the earth meant for it,

regenerate body!

For there what we were

would turn

down and in on the last

dimension, fire,

yet remain still

the columned

fluidly stable pulsing of the globed cell.

Or as if equipped

finally with a bell-jangling spear where runners

loped



dodging wolves, thieves,

nightlong

past the Na-khi Snow Range,

for that is what saves

what we've not yet

become

from longings to be what we're not,

saves it with sweaty

pouches of letters,

their inky

pictographs past the lakes,

starry waters?

as if in full spurt, the butter

lathered hide and leathery feet

of the alert heart.

Trophies, their mangey

vaunts

furring yellowing bone, stud the hinge we

must push against

to enter

peace, its gully of strifes

closed over, tensed

to reasonless calm.

Mosaic

election to save a whole people

draws to near-doom



50 FROM NOVA C?NTICA

in night's tent, God's

slashing muster against his own man.

And the stripped heads

of the columns

invaders

aligned on sacrifice,

dawn-pale Paestum's,

bear up piled skies

over

invaders from 'forty-four,

over hazes

of wanderers

endlessly

through and around: uncrumbling

design restores

darkness, the sun's

black push and the black backside of blue

converging, fins

streak up from offshore

silvers:

Moses could not know why,

the chorus never

came to the causes

for all its

whirlings. Shines thus, the word,

blinds, bears, and seizes.



John Peck 51

Innocence,

its tone

tensile, withdraws far into

each instance,

Little Black Boy, tinier

Chimney Sweep, dialectic

drawn thinner now?

a nine-year-old

who hungered

ported our new lighter rifle

crouched on the veld,

played Patroclus

to the men

and ate, then lay out redly

in his gut's tresses,

a girl no older

bent and

drew wages in Tiajuana,

bloodpricks on solder

wiring the junk heroes

to be shipped north while father

tried not to think,

and none of this

stood far off

in my sight or remote

in time, it is

what I find, Lord, at the day's

door with the edgewise swing

of system, squared




onto each surface

with the grain of greeting that the light yeasts, its benefice.

Fist, then, tiny thrust each hour

out of Virgil's prophecy still not remote, not unblessing us for each is

soul parve, puer?

not enraged swipes

at power,

nor in a hastening age

juvenile hopes?

nor even smoothing

bristles

oil-charged, or encaustics

cooling, soothing?

among silts ticking half-lives

outlive that rancors and each

master's stock-taking.

Aere perrenius

has turned

the tables on us, our acts

ungovern us.

Futures, those rare

children?

we sentimentalize

their loss, therefore?

are, with the pasts,

present

auras around the present,

not remote wastes?



John Peck 53

so it is no

bleary

prophecy to englobe

in a dry eye

the hale roundness,

practiced

from the genes, of a grasp

out of the blackness

moistly born and

by sheer

nerve triggered, fast around

one finger's end

inaugural

of lever,

hilt, hasp, shaft, shiv, knob, rod?

love's harsh holds all.

The record, then, the debated,

glorified,

castigated, ignored, fought-over

record is to be parsed by the grip that gets it and keeps it and brings it

down crashing? The record is

simply what happened? But no:

not all. Perhaps you hear it

at night, the wind

from other sleepers: Yes, we have been

Through it all. We are tired.

But tell us why you place these stones one

after the other.




Which things, come to grips, are an allegory:

Hagar's child is in no way

less a child, nor is Sarah's

more of one?it is that

a force is uttering them,

yeasting them into another

pattern that does not change them

yet holds them up, forward

into the tongued light.

There will be other children

divided by their father's

choices, reunited

in tales mounding like daybreak's loaves.

A dark child huddles in

his desert, a favored child

sleeps in his father's tent.

Relations are not

good between them, nor will they

ever be good.

Relations, though,

allegories of relations, deceive us, the full

awareness now

Like an encroaching

nova

back of their desert rim

will yoke them, searching

Them and us, we or the separations, level.

Perhaps you hear it at night, wind from the sleepers, endless over them, rising.



John Peck 55

A cloud-sweet stone

from Edouard

Morike, who could not

have known how, down

our canyons, jewels

beckon

finders from the safe rim,

and through jewels aisles

lashed from ladders

pour

to chutes of option: tiny,

but the whole shudders,

men go at the seam

of the days, ooze from the tons in them jells, their ice heroism

jolts crystal

to its far

gates and edges, for no

humbler or less tall

sway the headlamp burrowers

into those dimensions,

their Roman clomp?

better, then,

that I

do not know why a sorrow

wells unbidden




up through my light, a blurred

surge through each lattice rather

than the stab, late

geometries

morbid

in its prime bath: a sorrow

with no carved frieze

or enshrined reasons,

until

the flood of it makes float

off their stanchions

my walls, roof, yawing?

and sun

is dearer through broken eyes,

gem close and flowing



from "nova cantica"

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