The New Laws

for Henri Michaux

We need the poem of God
to talk about these.
For no other reason
do we need God.
How do we speak them?
Some brush stones;
some find space between the lips
in which to make loss
into music; others
get lines and do the original thing
with them.
And when they are ready
to be interpreted by the soul
they are grasped at all their edges
by every little fear and mania
and pulled out of shape
and pulled into shape
and dragged into the future
for a purpose you wouldn't even
imagine.
We say 'These are the new laws
which owing to their beauty
must be followed.
Confusion arises
because you cannot look directly
at them nor understand clearly
their force or meaning.
But be not afraid of doubt:
their alignment
with the desired possibilities
is perfect and their profundity
is equal to how many things
they connect.'
And we need the poem of God
to talk about them.
They are what we are growing into
and the terror they hold for us
is for this thing
we can never name.
How did we make laws
more wondrous than we could obey,
laws so accurate
that they foretold all our efforts
to break them?
For no other reason
do we need God
than our inability
to speak of such things.

The Song of a Stone

Is that the poet who deprived the world of his work?
Such wondrous provocation.
So many people who see and hear nothing
sit back rubbing their eyes as another curtain waves
in a wind that has ceased to blow.
He has moved to the mountains they say
and in the evenings and mornings sleeps as a baby would sleep.
There is a moth that dies on his open palm
and he is as grateful for its soft silence as he is for the heart-jarring clash
of the possum on his tin roof.
Whenever the sun appears again he walks out
to find replies in the earth.
Its hot breath.
He takes with him all his human clumsiness.
The feet whose path he knows by heart tripping
over skulls and things.
His lips move in time with the world.
There is a brush-turkey making a racket.
Reciting the dirt as if it was once again a stone.

^

Biography

MTC Cronin has published ten books of poetry, most recently a Spanish/English edition of her 2001 book, Talking to Neruda's Questions, translated by Juan Garrido Salgado (SAFO, Santiago, Chile, 2004) and <More or Less Than> 1 - 100, (Shearsman Press, UK, 2004, www.shearsman.com). Her next collection is forthcoming from Ravenna Press, USA.