Raptus

The door to the past is a strange door. It swings open and things pass through it, but they pass in one direction only. No man can return across that threshold, though he can look down still and see the green light waver in the weeds.
--Loren Eiseley

A door opens in the wilderness.
People cross through it—bloused women families

Acquaintances friends all the ones I have loved
Sleep-walkers night-walkers each dazed and shorn—

Street aurous with ice, a snowfall scratched into
Moons—and everything I’d known—

Inside the bleak floating light of my lungs
In the capillaries of my eyes a blood

Glancing through the hatches—
If I said I would always be grateful

If I lied or touched with spite
If night is just a foamline of shadows

Though we were both lost—the door
Opening—the fear of being shown

Whole to the one who must love you still—
And stopped as if on a walk to say

Look at that and what matters what really counts
And I’ll tell you everything if you promise I promise

I stood at door and behind me heard
Snow-plows scrape against roads

At the center of night—unknown to yourself
And the word I said out-loud to no one

That meant it was all to no purpose
The word for the desire inside destruction

For everything that can never be brought back—
Loose snow blown hard to each bank

And the common reel of those who
To avoid one extreme rush toward its opposite—

Snow blasted to piles—and never opened up to
Anything that could reach me until you reached me—

Which hours belonged to us
When was I unknowingly alone

Why did you always return to walk here a path
Behind my closed eyes shedding salt

Dry snowfall and sticks—still were you here
With me I might say The moon rose in the casement window

The red-haired boy across the street has learned to ride his bike
There are still picnics there are fountains

And the world I am leaving behind says
One learns to see one learns to be kind—

I closed my eyes I closed my hands
I shut down the fields in my arms

The cattle on the plains veins ditches
Blue ravines a gray bird

Sailing through a poplar brake kids
Throwing snow I closed the last swinging juncos

Sheep wool caught on barbed wire I closed
Fumes and clear patches of sky I seized

The river the town I shut down
The hard muscles of sleep farmlands

Warming under midnight salt-lights scruff-pines
On the ridge animals scattering across slopes I closed

The smooth bone of evening a storm
On the hills white and noiseless spindled

Prairies where I was born I shut I seized
The clouds I closed in anger—fervor—ardor