Response from Apple Farm Writer Jo Marie Thompson from Kevala retreat in Wisconsin
I.
The pronouncement of an oracle is sought -
and on her terms – perhaps on the
seventh day of every lunar month,
and only by those who have
sacrificed plenty and well.
The ravings of a prophet
are stringently avoided
though revered on arrival –
issuing from the throat
of a roundly disturbed man to
his unsettled audience, cringing
down the funnel of history.
Now a seer is another matter,
with a livelihood to earn and clients
to satisfy, but riding hard
after God’s hound nonetheless.
An omen is tender and close -
arriving in a cloak of silence
near the edge of vision
in one unchosen moment -
the leading edge of
the eclipse of what was
by the white heat
of knowing.
The Muse is closer still
and more dear.
What poet hasn’t felt
the whisper of a poem
arriving, left a list undone,
dishes stacked in a sink while
she leans in hard for an
hour or a week, straining to hear?
The augury of The Dream is famous
in my family, and perhaps in yours,
and also among anxious mothers
everywhere with children abroad.
I once dreamed of an acquaintance
on a bus in Russia, my dreaming self
knew that because we were in Russia
I would later marry him. And I did.
And my waking self still confounds
at the meaning of Russia in the
meaning of Marriage. [...]
I.
The pronouncement of an oracle is sought -
and on her terms – perhaps on the
seventh day of every lunar month,
and only by those who have
sacrificed plenty and well.
The ravings of a prophet
are stringently avoided
though revered on arrival –
issuing from the throat
of a roundly disturbed man to
his unsettled audience, cringing
down the funnel of history.
Now a seer is another matter,
with a livelihood to earn and clients
to satisfy, but riding hard
after God’s hound nonetheless.
An omen is tender and close -
arriving in a cloak of silence
near the edge of vision
in one unchosen moment -
the leading edge of
the eclipse of what was
by the white heat
of knowing.
The Muse is closer still
and more dear.
What poet hasn’t felt
the whisper of a poem
arriving, left a list undone,
dishes stacked in a sink while
she leans in hard for an
hour or a week, straining to hear?
The augury of The Dream is famous
in my family, and perhaps in yours,
and also among anxious mothers
everywhere with children abroad.
I once dreamed of an acquaintance
on a bus in Russia, my dreaming self
knew that because we were in Russia
I would later marry him. And I did.
And my waking self still confounds
at the meaning of Russia in the
meaning of Marriage. [...]
II.
Once while riding on a cold and sun-shot
winter morning, a story was told
on a fresh deep blanket of snow.
On the sloping field of white
three cleanly etched tracks
came into view –
The delicate spiral of a field mouse
who popped straight up and out
of the snowy blanket of his house.
Widening circles trace the opening,
a circumambulation of tiny feet,
then a long zen arc heading sun-wards
to meet the splash of a hawk’s
wings and tail, each feathered
tip emblazoned in perfect relief
on that pristine canvas.
The third long set of tracks belong
to a deer traversing the slope from
west to east and nearly touching,
but not pausing, at this mid-winter tale
before vanishing in the rising sun.
With a sharp breath
and a deep-down knowing
I sense the news of the day,
though my outer ears
still wait to hear.
The wide white mare
beneath me is a giant in both
stature and in kindness.
Her tracks add a fourth to this
montage, as we turn to leave.
Later, the call comes:
the acquaintance
from the Russian bus,
who is now my husband,
and who was placed
two weeks ago in
apparent good health
on a plane for Thailand,
is at a hospital there.
A tumor fills his belly.
He’s flying home.
When that day returns now
it is not with the shock of
life interrupted, but with
the glittering silence
of the messenger,
the calligraphy
of foot and feather.
The way the bright early sun
reached everywhere.
The way everything was seen
and nothing could be lost.
III.
The Delphic oracle
once famously responded
to a military inquiry:
“You will go
you will return
never
in war will you perish”
That floating ‘never’
was of no account.
What mattered was that
God’s whisper could
be held close in battle.
Some days this is what I pray:
Let God’s messenger
arrive like the Gabriel
of my imagination -
disheveled and unshaven,
shirt sleeves torn in
some terrible tussle.
In my version, he looks Mary
dead in the eye:
“Another vessel shattered.”
“I know” she says, “I saw the stars.
I’ll do anything you want.”
She doesn’t look away.
He doesn’t flinch.
And that is one true telling of
how a bright and fearsome
new epoch begins.
And one true telling of
communion, and the future -
be it damned or blessed – the birth
and the apocalypse portended
weighing less than the
nearness and the gaze,
the fact of a messenger
and the one to receive him,
the subsidence of miracles
into just this one,
the submission finally
to a calamitous present,
and the holy nearness of it all.
Jo Marie Thompson, February 6, 2019 at Kevala Retreat for Apple Farm
Once while riding on a cold and sun-shot
winter morning, a story was told
on a fresh deep blanket of snow.
On the sloping field of white
three cleanly etched tracks
came into view –
The delicate spiral of a field mouse
who popped straight up and out
of the snowy blanket of his house.
Widening circles trace the opening,
a circumambulation of tiny feet,
then a long zen arc heading sun-wards
to meet the splash of a hawk’s
wings and tail, each feathered
tip emblazoned in perfect relief
on that pristine canvas.
The third long set of tracks belong
to a deer traversing the slope from
west to east and nearly touching,
but not pausing, at this mid-winter tale
before vanishing in the rising sun.
With a sharp breath
and a deep-down knowing
I sense the news of the day,
though my outer ears
still wait to hear.
The wide white mare
beneath me is a giant in both
stature and in kindness.
Her tracks add a fourth to this
montage, as we turn to leave.
Later, the call comes:
the acquaintance
from the Russian bus,
who is now my husband,
and who was placed
two weeks ago in
apparent good health
on a plane for Thailand,
is at a hospital there.
A tumor fills his belly.
He’s flying home.
When that day returns now
it is not with the shock of
life interrupted, but with
the glittering silence
of the messenger,
the calligraphy
of foot and feather.
The way the bright early sun
reached everywhere.
The way everything was seen
and nothing could be lost.
III.
The Delphic oracle
once famously responded
to a military inquiry:
“You will go
you will return
never
in war will you perish”
That floating ‘never’
was of no account.
What mattered was that
God’s whisper could
be held close in battle.
Some days this is what I pray:
Let God’s messenger
arrive like the Gabriel
of my imagination -
disheveled and unshaven,
shirt sleeves torn in
some terrible tussle.
In my version, he looks Mary
dead in the eye:
“Another vessel shattered.”
“I know” she says, “I saw the stars.
I’ll do anything you want.”
She doesn’t look away.
He doesn’t flinch.
And that is one true telling of
how a bright and fearsome
new epoch begins.
And one true telling of
communion, and the future -
be it damned or blessed – the birth
and the apocalypse portended
weighing less than the
nearness and the gaze,
the fact of a messenger
and the one to receive him,
the subsidence of miracles
into just this one,
the submission finally
to a calamitous present,
and the holy nearness of it all.
Jo Marie Thompson, February 6, 2019 at Kevala Retreat for Apple Farm
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