Frontiers are peculiar places,
whether in Ostrov or in Fort Kent,
that call for another set of eyes
than those that heave and bristle
in the middle of the hive.
For on those borderland edges
all that is keeps its other
tucked close underneath what claims,
“This is it and basta.”
And even Dan, one of the two
most wondrous students of mine
from that small place by the St. John
River,
whose very name used to be a trope
for “utmost extremity” in the Levant,
was perturbed by how much otherness
the soul herself makes us taste
when all one wants is to have it
at last—all simple, neat, and
straight—
and so, in sheer exasperation,
he once said:
“I know nothing of these other languages.
Why won’t my soul speak to me
in plain, current English?
I don’t understand
why she makes everything
more complex than it has to be!”
And yet he himself could read Greek
letters
as easily as his own alphabet
without ever being taught
what that ancient language says,
and yet himself was—by his soul’s
design—
a true psychopomp, who was asked
to smuggle, or, to be more correct,
to help the select dead move
from this to the other world
and realize, once entered,
that other ineffable state.
And thus, as he put it:
“We are being visited
by sights and sounds
beyond what the extant mind
may ever remember …
even though I have always sensed
the presence where I have lived
even when darkness abounded,
whether within or without,
made of shadows and so black
that they parted the dark itself.
But then I remembered
I worked what mortals would call ‘death,’
and that not to obey someone with such clout
is never taken lightly—but what is, in truth,
ever at stake
is how one holds to
that power and presence
ever abiding there in the deepest heart,
with all her wisdom, all her sublime calm,
the ‘Aino-Mora,’ ‘The Sole One,’
from the mirror’s unseen back.
Or was she—is she—all the way from Japan,
perhaps, and hence a ‘Love Field,’
or ‘The Love’s Own Sound,’
or a trace of a fading palimpsest
that used to spell Harmonia
but then lost its ‘H’?”
And so the surface and the depth,
like two mirror-cut sides,
always tied and yet apart,
our souls and even our art
try to tally and bring in line,
as if ignorance and wisdom
could ever match and become one.
But if the presence decides
to grant us, once, its breath of
grace,
then, on occasion, a marvel,
a divine marvel, may reach out.
