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[Service with Benediction]
[Stone Bird]
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“Service with Benediction”
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Chunk honey, creamed honey, buckwheat
honey on buckwheat bread—like glass lanterns,
there’s enough concentrated summer sun caught
in these jars of comb honey to give us
ample light to travel by on a winter night.
Sesame breads, sausage breads, almond
breads, sweet panettones, cassava cakes
and millet cakes, all are laid out
on the table before me beside these bowls
of molasses honey and heather honey, wild-
wood honey gathered by wild bees, hallows
of honey, orisons of bulging loaves.
So I eat sun and earth by the slice
and spoonful, suck yeast breads soaked
in alfalfa honey, dip crusts dripping
from the dish to my mouth, lick gold
sugar from my fingers. I swallow
pure flower syrup brought from the sky,
chew the kneaded spike and germ of fields
and gardens. Surely I become then
all the arabesques of bee dances
and the cultures of beebread balls rolled
from nectar pollen. I comply easily
with the lean of heady buds and grasses
waxing and waning at their cores
sunk in the earth.
Two gifts, I heard the temple bakers say,
when, for immortality, the priests immersed
his dead body naked before burial
in a cistern of amber honey.
Allow me now in the fullness of this morning
to consume enough clover honey and white
wheat fire to see my way clearly
through the cold night coming. |
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“Stone Bird”
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I remember you. You’re the one
who lifted your ancient bones
of fossil rock, pulled yourself free
of the strata like a plaster figure
rising from its own mold, became
flesh and feather, took wing,
arrested the sky.
You’re the one who, though marble,
floated as beautifully as a white
blossom on the pond all summer,
who, though skeletal and particled
like winter, glimmered as solid as a bird
of cut crystal in the icy trees.
You are redbird—sandstone
wings and agate eyes—at dusk.
You are greybird—polished granite
and pearl eyes—just before dawn,
midnight bird with a reflective
vacancy of heart like a mirror
of pure obsidian.
You’re the one who flew down
to that river from the heavens,
as if your form alone were the only
holy message needed. You were alabaster
then in the noonday sun.
Once I saw you rise without rising
from your prison pedestal
in the garden beneath the lime tree.
At that moment your ghost
in its haunting permeated every
regality of the forest with light,
reigned with disdain in thin air
above the mountain, sank in union
with the crosswinds of the sea.
I remember you. You’re the one
who entered in through my death
as if it were an open window
and you were the sound of the serenade
being sung outside for me, the words
of which, I know now, are of freedom
cast in stone forever.
You’re the one who flew down
to that river from the heavens,
as if your form alone were the only
holy message needed. You were alabaster
then in the noonday sun.
Once I saw you rise without rising
from your prison pedestal
in the garden beneath the lime tree.
At that moment your ghost
in its haunting permeated every
regality of the forest with light,
reigned with disdain in thin air
above the mountain, sand in union
with the crosswinds of the sea.
I remember you. You’re the one
who entered in through my death
as if it were an open window
and you were the sound of the serenade
being sung outside for me, the words
of which, I know now, are of freedom
cast in stone forever.
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PATTIANN ROGERS was born in Joplin, Missouri, and
graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BA from the University of Missouri in
1961. She received a Master of Arts from the University of Houston in
1981. She has taught at the University of Texas, the University of
Montana, Washington University of St. Louis, and Mercer University as the
Ferrol Sams Distinguished Writer-in-Residence. She taught in the Creative
Writing Program during the spring semesters, 1993 to 1997, at the
University of Arkansas. She is the mother of two sons and a
daughter-in-law and lives with her husband, a retired geophysicist, in
Colorado.
