Chuang Tze
When I was digging as a child, I found a book,
damp, sedated,
eaten at the edges
like a father at the end of a long hard day.
It said the most useless tree
is
the most precious.
Never mind the tree’s point of view.
What I held in my hands kept falling
from its bones like a piece of music.
That voice in the distance kept calling me in
for dinner.
Thank you.
But all I heard was music,
weird and funny,
useless and unafraid.
*
Like a nightingale with a toothache,
Satie wrote
in the margins of his music.
Never mind the bird’s point of view.
A song like that could save you.
If not you, a park
earmarked by the city council.
If not this song,
the one about a world
that suffers such songs.
A friend played that tune for me
on an upright
in his studio apartment.
I did not know how sick he was.
He closed his eyes.
A song like that
could pull a wasted body to the sun.
*
I read a man who believed
what we call true
is true
because it is useful
to think so.
If so, why say.
What’s the use of that.
I read another who believed,
what is beautiful
cannot be true.
I too long to be loved,
miserable, maybe a little
confused.
I heard a singer
whisper to a dead brother,
I will carry you.
I carry his tune like a sack
of broken glass that chimes.
And as I walk, the crickets
follow
and all who hear in the brokenness
their own.
*
Everyone has a price, says the man
in a long coat
in an old film noire,
his eyes narrowed into slots
that take the coins
of moonlight in.
He knows,
bribery or threat, pick your poison.
Ever the one
inside the other.
Everyone has a name,
says the precious metal
of light
drawn across the effigies at night,
and when it goes,
the stone goes smooth.
Ripples fade.
Heaven reappears.
*
In movies, people die for riches
that die in turn,
reabsorbed
into the bloodstream
of another movie,
a dull affair where we all appear,
and no one sees.
If the dark of theaters
gives every star its wings,
why then return
to the dreamless portion.
What do we hope to learn
or unlearn.
Why mend our lives
in the unobserved,
the useless and unafraid,
where no rain silvers
the limousine.
No cold arrival blackens the earth.
*
No true lover turns to her other and says,
we could use a child.
Which is why children’s faces light
public relations
that promise what you want,
never
what you need.
Meanwhile a sponsor, an image maker,
turns to the air and says,
we could use
a cat,
a family, an avatar.
We could use a child.
Never the seabird in the tar,
the falling cliffs of ice,
the dreamless sleep
on which our days ahead are written.
If you squeeze a planet hard enough
for all you can use,
what remains is a motel room
in a desert town,
a jar of pills on the bedside.
In the corner,
a child howls
over and over.
Over and over,
the rise and fall of sirens
and wolves
who cannot tell you why.
*
When I was a child, I found a book
deep inside an earth
that stood once,
wrote the words,
and so laid down again.
It said,
when a loved one dies,
think,
they have just gone on to lie in a vast room.
I who know nothing,
I call it vast.
As oceans are or a forest full of rain,
an ecosystem
crowned in a wide and starless dark.
Thank you, earth,
I say.
I who know nothing like a child
with a book
reading to a grave.
*
Chuang Tze says, everyone knows
the use of the useful.
But the use of the useless, well…
I too have felt small before the woods
on fire in the distance.
Every breath I took,
poisonous, precious,
a blacker black inside
a closet.
I prayed for instruments to save us,
to spare the creatures who go nameless.
The use of the useless is the door
they open,
their keys in us turning the tumbler,
letting in the rain.
Dear Chuang Tze,
when did power become its own reward.
If happiness is how we cease the search
to find it,
is it not a bit like sadness.
*
Who has not heard the news,
watched the fire spread across a map
of the world
and longed for a better plan.
A stronger lever. A science.
But tell me why
one falls in love with science.
There must be a tiny forest in the eye.
To love a life
is
to walk a path beneath those branches.
Who’s to say fire first came to the center of our circle
because it served us.
Were we not a little powerless,
the search suspended,
amazed,
our backs to the shadows
that fell
into the arms and shadows of the trees.
Bruce Bond is the author of 35 books including, most recently, Patmos (Juniper Prize, UMass), Behemoth (New Criterion Prize), Liberation of Dissonance (Schaffner Award for Literature in Music), Choreomania (MadHat), Invention of the Wilderness (LSU), and Therapon (with Dan Beachy-Quick, Tupelo Press).
Read Bruce Bond’s long poem “The Blue Marble, II” also appearing in Terrain.org.
Header photo by damesophie, courtesy Pixabay.
