The Ancient Surge of Stars and Night
Opens as All Being’s Single Bloom
i. Emerge
Orange of oriole
will flash as aureole
of afterimage.
Pines will stand
in orange aureole,
each a shrine of fire.
Words will mist in winter,
flocks chattering
to swirl to sky
to clear like breath in air.
Blown snow will lift
drifting cloudily
to pollen’s gold,
to twist to sand’s blind lash.
Like faces, sunflowers
turn toward the far fire.
It is the fire floating,
centering the circle
of their world’s course.
Through murky depths
of uterine night,
all stars swirl out, colloidal,
to rupture and kindle.
As icicles melt
in sun’s brightening,
raised megaliths will melt
in time’s night.
Wrecked trucks will rust
under a bright
ceiling of waves.
ii. Augury
You would walk listening
if you passed beneath
final branches’ glaring aura.
Tides will shift seeping
through marsh grass,
as sand’s hot blaze will drain
glittering through fingers.
Dunes will drift burying
cars like urns, deeper
than sun’s punishment.
Wind’s dunes will shimmer,
unearthing the colors
of cars’ pitted paint.
Like ebb tide’s surf,
tree lines will ebb.
Like leaves’ sheltered shade,
plumage’s browns
will hide through leaves
of forests receding.
Wings’ sudden flurry
will be wings vanishing
in the rites of flight.
You would walk listening
in entering the hearing
of the minutes’
last song of the last
bird of its kind.
You might be who waits
in the moment of a trill
stilling into silence,
opening into echoes.
iii. Self
You will echo as you walk
under branches, listening.
Dull plumage of veery
mirrors shade, blending.
Its song’s repetitions
pronounce living beauty.
You will falter, following
past each narrow tomorrow.
The speech of echoes
will repeat the few words
for you to follow
like steppingstones.
Your entered moments
will hover like mist
over a river’s
deafening fall and crash.
You will hear wind’s tide
flood through the tall pines
as aeolian orisons.
You will hear
your voice finding
the words of your orison
like the span of horizon.
You will be a bearer
of what will be,
as you echo. You will echo.
You will be the bearer
of what you will be,
as you echo. You will echo.
iv. The Beauty of the Earth
Meaning, abandoned
to the middens, will lift
from your starless abyss
as you echo. You will echo.
Echoing through rondure
in your skull’s inner mirror,
sky’s blue will know you
as you echo. You will echo.
You will hear the moment
that is your life sung
by a bird taking wing
as you echo. You will echo.
Wind will bear wildfire’s
bright seeds, sparking
into bright wildflowers
as you echo. You will echo.
You will feel your spine rise
to echo the towering
pine among pines
as you echo. You will echo.
When you hear the roar
of the course of the river,
you will follow its echoes
as you echo. You will echo.
Left behind you, its waters
will be a wake’s shimmer
that anyone might follow
called by echoes, who will echo.
Daniel Corrie’s recent chapbooks are Words, World (Blue Horse Press) and For the Future (Iris Press). His poems have appeared in The Birmingham Poetry Review, Greensboro Review, Hudson Review, Image, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, New Criterion, Shenandoah, Southern Review, and Virginia Quarterly Review. One of his poems received the first-place 2011 Morton Marr Poetry Prize from The Southwest Review. He and his wife live on their farm in rural Georgia.
View poetry by Daniel Corrie also appearing in Terrain.org: one poem in three parts and one poem.
Header photo of pines in sunlight by Larisa-K, courtesy Pixabay.
