From "against which"

by Joel Chace


​

​​
​On anguish, affliction, proscription, and terror! --
dash away all! Her mantra, with
coffee and toast. Remember that the
Lord walks among the pots and
pans. Who’s to blame her? Divorce.
Chemo. Empty nest -- not to be
equated with emptiness, she reminds everyone.
That one image, though, she can’t
seem to make scat, and just
a stupid one. Time is what
keeps the light from reaching us.
Way back in college, freshman year,
a dumb, flat, black tarpaper roof
covered by garbage, just below her
window. When the Soul wants to
experience something she throws out an
image in front of her and
then steps into it. This keeps
breaking through, rending the veil. Closing
up the lake cottage, he stomps
on an in-ground bees’ nest, then
registers the stings two steps beyond.
We need to fall, and we
need to be aware of it.
Next morning he sits in that
year’s first faculty meeting, no more
comatose than usual, fingering the puncture
wounds on his legs. Again, again.
In his head, the words, Again,
Again. He wants his wife, his
kids, his home -- now. And what
was previously the object of your
seeking, now seeks you; what you
hunted, now hunts you. He wants,
finally, what he is, I am
what I wanted and I want
what I am.


​
On anguish, the Old Masters most
likely knew no more than anyone
else. Why would they? There is
a want but it is abstract
and cold, a dead want that
goes well into writing because writing
is dead. Writing is dead. Art
is dead, dead by nature, not
killed by unkindness. On the anniversary
of their child’s death, they never
have much to say to each
other. Forty years past, their neighbor
farmer lifted the girl’s body from
his swollen stream, carried it almost
one mile across his fields and
theirs, through the back door, then
laid it gently on their kitchen
table. He sat with them the
whole night. None of them spoke.
The light is satisfied only in
the innermost place, where no one
dwells. It is within you even
deeper than you are in yourself.
It is the ground of simple
silence that is motionless in itself.
At the crash site, she identifies
her son. She tells the medics,
Put me in the body bag
with him; please put me there
with him. We are all meant
to be mothers of God, for
God is always needing to be
born. Decades after, she keeps saying,
I’m in the body bag; I’m
in there, too. Only the hand
that erases can write the true
thing.


​
A scent mist carries on a
breeze -- brown, crushed magnolia leaves. Wivving,
bolz, jelok. She registers it, dreams
it, recognizes it -- in morning light --
as that usual harbinger of summer’s
horror. Alas, that the air is
so calm, that the world is
so bright. When storms were still
raging, I was not so wretched.
Aloud, she says, Oh, winter, are
you leaving me? Moliate, rupped. Come
again, snow. This supreme tearing apart,
this incomparable agony, this marvel of
love. It will, but not before
those long days of heat waves
over macadam, of humidity welling up
from valleys, of droplets snaking down
her spine. God passes through the
thicket of the world. Defacc, infram,
ig.



Ascent. Cliff -- eighty-five degree angle and
so high that once they float
to the top and gaze back
down, they’re far ahead of where
they’d been standing , at the base.
Everyone entrusted with a mission is
an angel. All they now see --
a grassy plain stretching away,
declined just enough so that the
horizon disappears. They’re not sure what
to do. Angels are not usually
left in such circumstances. Whoever perceives
God through matter is not all
fire: rather, there is some matter
together with the fire. They don’t
feel abandoned, exactly -- only somewhat weighed
down, Also odd, since they’ve just
been flying, hovering. The circle, symbol
of monotony which is beautiful; the
swinging of a pendulum, symbol of
monotony which is atrocious. For quite
a while of late, they’ve spoken
human, but now switch back to
angel. This helps, though before long
they experience -- what? One of them
speaks the foreign word, Gravity.


Joel Chace's work spans five decades and has appeared in Lana Turner, The Brooklyn Rail, and various other periodicals, collections and chapbooks.