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Once it begins it continues
And the river extends into possibilities both historical and speculative
Yet the procession might easily be a massacre where history is not a fixed
narrative
But a story you might tell yourself or anyone who'll stop to listen
Already everything has been said and nothing else need be but we
are human and continue
Warding off consequence and death
Or trying to with a pronouncement we hope will be as vivid as those strokes
Stretching (without effort) from incident to implication to consequence
But we are human and find not everything has been said as it might be in
a better way
Or in a way to help us move beyond the massacre and troops massed
about the village
Though there is no way to avoid what must be faced down
As if to prove, if only to ourselves, that we did not look the other way when
we should have turned the other cheek
If he falls we fall but if he rises we are edified –
Or seeing him fall and wanting to rush forward even though we hesitate
As if everything has been said
Yet our speech must exonerate us and by a word step into the frame
And walk towards a future we wish were otherwise
Turmoil and serenity
The one expected, the other an imbalance –
But which is which?
A mother holding the child she will hold as a dead man
Where if she is pieta unto us what comfort is offered her?
Omit everything else –husband and soldiery are incidental and wise men
are not wise
No more than we are who none the less are rendered new because
serenity calms the turmoil
And holds it for our credulity
The splendor is isolated but like a cart-wheel rolls towards us
The future is happening though nothing appears to be happening
Yet there it is –somewhere between mother and child, between then and now
Between the splendors we see and the splendor we infer
And if soldiers are gathered what are they gathered for?
What prompts them from the future to the present towards the future they
foreshadow?
It is there in pikes and swords, in their whisperings, in the way they
look away
But in so doing betray their intentions
Thirty wars have preceded this and thirty more will follow
Thirty wars and thirty more where they gather to infer the splendor
that might be a resolution
Of the cart-wheels and the rut-tracks and the mire
What happened then is happening now –a scene history needs to repeat
The essence of which is elusive but beguiling
Yet to fill the verdant pastures so is to have faith in the future
To say the school-yard outlasts the drill yard
That the leafless tree will green again
That where there is motion stillness will come
Yet look away if beauty offends you but hold your ground if it does not
Hold also the conviction that such as this endures
That history is more than blind-man's-buff, that the hoop a child passes
playfully through
Will always hold enough of imagination's equilibrium to rightly reset the
world to his requirements
And now bagpipes, like gourds of juice music is pumped from, are pumped
And impish fiddlers challenge for mastery of the air
And dancers claim the common ground of the child who'll soldier-march
from play-ground to battle-ground
Without ever leaving this place
He will not leave and you will not leave for there is nowhere else to go
And that child wandering into the distance is wandering into his future
Perhaps it's decided, perhaps it's not, and perhaps that's not important
Only that he walks, only that he goes where his blood-pulse leads
somewhere beyond the painting's frame
As the magnet towards which the iron-fillings of his mind and the compass-
arrow of his heart are held
And impelling him
Nothing is required to enter history –you are here, you have entered
Then it's forwards or backwards for there's no standing still
With desire or detachment or desire and detachment as the brothers and
keepers
Of what you are and hope to be
The lushness of the Ieper Road contrasts the Calvary path yet oddly
complements it –
Unless, that is, there is a correspondence (As Rilke would later delineate)
Between the leafy road and the sparse landscape that joins them
Not (only) as approximations but of that which is most human in ourselves
And one might be a preparation of consolation for the fact of the other
Everything has been said but we are human and seek an
exonerating speech
Holding Oak and Willow and Alder like a transforming talisman to blot
out the desolation
And the Oak's shadow falls across an uneven path of stones
Not because we would have it so but because from its root
Two beams were hacked upon which the crucified now hangs
Sagging towards death, towards the world, towards those waiting for
something close to miracle
To correspond to their hope and make it vivid beyond dispute or denial
And though you stop for beauty you stop for sorrow
And even the lyric is elegy in it most human form
So if you stop for beauty you are also stopping for sorrow
Where Oak and Alder bend to time the Willow bows before
Splendid? Yes –but the dead are not splendid
And even if it seems some afterlife casts an explanatory light
There is still the horror, the unavoidable human pain, for this is not snow
but sorrow
Many have died and others will die -
Dresses of predictable black, plumed horses and carriage
But the living are not consoled for grief is a birthright
And see, the dead arrive
To the chill room they come, are already nearing, their breath upon us
Arms outstretched in invitations to huddle under their shadow
A moment's brightness gone wayward, dissolving in snow upon the dark
Upon treeless hills, upon bog, river and gravestone
On the loneliness of blackened thorns
Onto which souls are falling to their last end
Not winter now
Not snow, not children in toboggans, nor ice on ponds, not shivering mites
seeking shelter
Not a woman on a donkey with her basket
So who are these ones crowing the world?
They are ourselves –not always as we would have us be but they are
ourselves -
Jousters and hooligans, drinkers, pilgrims, orphans, blind-men, tax-men
and census takers
We are what we are and are his
The road that leads to the Ieper Road begins at my door where if I pause I do
not stop
Or only do so to let the reapers pass before I rejoin the procession
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