Destiny
… the glory of the human has become the desolation
of the Earth, and now the desolation of the Earth
is becoming the destiny of the human.
– David R. Loy
i.
Carried by the future’s night,
stars will drift from constellations
beyond eyes that saw heroes and charmed animals
crossing and recrossing a sky.
Captured in the prophecies of yellow ink,
a wandering star would still
into a pentacle of a card foretelling futures.
Down through a deck’s stack, pentacles descend.
Wands, cups, swords, arcana descend.
One card’s face is buried
under another card’s face buried
deeper through the layers.
Mountains had reared, strata’s layers
buckling, continent butting into continent.
Haunting hidden strata,
stones are afterimages of animals fallen.
Interred through heavings, shards’ effigies
of lives would shift in burial.
Struck by sunlight, ground buries ground’s
surfaces sinking farther from light.
Again the horizon will shuffle
the vision of time’s sky to change
from one sun showering sunlight
into suns scattering through night.
Shuffled, laid down, picked up and shuffled,
arcana sink and surface. Card into card
ascending through a deck, each card will be
the floor of cards’ order rising
into a future rising.
ii.
The sudden surge of starless night
had opened as all being’s single bloom.
Now’s edge of evanescence
passed through time’s long coma.
Galaxies’ spirals gleamed through darkness.
The ancient surge of stars and night
opens as all being’s single bloom.
Depths belched bubbles’ stalks,
fumeroles boiling. Bacterial billows
drifted up through sun-speared fathoms.
Smeared on lapping’s shallow rocks,
washed in sunlight, blind slime greened
to thrive from sunlight.
There would be millennia
of the sun’s path, its analemmas
tracing light’s migrant arcs through sky.
There would be growth rings expanding,
trees falling to wreckage of petrified trunks
like temples’ toppled columns.
There would be the aftermaths of boulders
carried and abandoned
by glaciers’ vanished ice.
There would be sand forming to rock,
rock weathering away into sand.
There would be the tracks of deer
left behind in sand,
to be lost in rain and wind.
There would be the taloned track
of tyrannosaurus left in mud
for searching eyes to find in rock.
Where life at last emerged
from time’s dark wellspring,
minds would come to know night sky’s
slash of stars to be a turning wheel
that had carried gas clouds and dust
drifting to shape into a world.
Risen from sea to study stars,
minds would come to know
how wandering starlight would begin
to cross the wheel’s width, to continue
more than one hundred thousand years
traversing the bright diameter.
Born from savannas to study stars,
minds would come to know the wheel
had turned a quarter turn from the time
of tyrannosaurus following its hunger.
From sun’s arc of glare, snow vanishes to rivers,
rivers ghosting up into clouds blown floating
over a highway’s gray river, asphalt river
pouring into asphalt rivers, scoring continents.
Life washed into sunlight. Across surf’s rocks,
primal slime had sensed sun’s warmth
of light brightening across its green, presaging
antlers’ sunstruck rush
into the time of stalking’s arrow aimed,
into the time of the rifle aimed—
into the time of shoulders’ feel
of sunlight’s warmth.
Dawn had been a goddess, reddening sky.
Sun had been a god’s chariot, crossing sky.
Like toys purloined from astral dreams,
orreries’ brass planets had circled.
On a stage, Prospero’s magic summoned rain,
wind lashing sea and snapping masts.
Above sea’s crash, beside cliff’s precipice,
the Fool strode through a card’s picture.
The bright cards fall. Bright birds fly
clearing to air’s transparency.
From stars’ origins, a pentacle would glare
risen as zenith’s gong of sun.
From eons’ unkept noctuaries—
from sunlight crossing unseen waves—
from time’s emergence,
a world changer emerged.
Sun’s temperate eye would shimmer
into famine’s torrid stare.
One world had followed its orbit.
One world would follow its orbit.
The bright spirals had revolved in darkness
into dead distances. Into the dead distances,
the bright spirals would revolve in darkness.
iii.
In a trance of cards, a card followed a card.
Hypnopompic dreams dreamed themselves.
A card followed a card, foretelling.
Sortilege after sortilege, the seasons fell.
Out from wandering time, an ape wandered.
A self approached, hearing itself whisper
through trees’ leaves, to hear water
like words beginning to slur
from a current where a face warped.
Cards murmured their story of ripples
mirroring up into a face gazing down.
A half-ape gazed at its face in water
to reach a hand toward the other’s face.
From prophecies soughing
through savannas’ swaying grasses,
a crouched scavenger rose, to hunt.
Hands emerged, billion after billion,
to shuffle seasons. An animal rose,
unbridling the brawn of seasons.
To sow the rain, to reap the flood—
To sow the drought, to reap the famine—
To sow the wind, to reap the whirlwind,
hurricanes rose human-summoned,
walls of wind’s curve rushing past
scouring to scatter cards’ images
of the Lovers, the Chariot, Fortune’s Wheel,
Hierophant, Magician, Devil, Fool,
Hanged Man, Justice, Death, the Tower,
the Star, the Sun, the World.
Through the stilling in storm’s eye,
like leaves through air, cards drift down.
The card portraying two naked lovers
falls to earth, this time to warn
You must not destroy your world—
You must not destroy your world—
You must not destroy your world—
In a trance of cards, a card followed a card.
Hypnagogic dreams dreamed themselves.
iv.
A seedling would rise, greening
to a rampike’s brittle branches.
A seedling self would presage
a rampike self.
Into late beginning, selfhood began
whispering to itself—
You must not destroy your world—
Eyes lift to the absence of stars,
outshone, buried in nights’ sky
beyond the swarming glow
of manufactured lights sifting up
as the dome of nights’ eclipsing aura.
Glass buildings’ lights mirror over
the passing of windshields’ glass.
You must not destroy your world—
Glowing under constellations,
bioluminescent waves
have risen and fallen through nights.
Beyond the risen into the fallen
into the risen into the fallen,
the laws have stood. The laws stand,
acidic waves passing over
the rubble of bleached reefs,
storms twisting over seawalls,
waves of wildfire washing through forests.
The laws stand, ruled over
by the sun’s indifferent passing.
You must not destroy your world—
says the seedling self—
says the rampike self—
To follow a destiny of deer
too abundant for their forest,
starving into die-off—
To follow the destiny of pigeons’
numbers darkening the sky,
to be shredded from the sky—
To be born into a destiny
of being one among a species
creating its human world and time—
shredding its world and time—
You must not destroy your world—
says the seedling self—
says the rampike self—
The course of the evaporated river
of the vast past poured
through moments’ passing presence.
In the morning of a half-ape,
the morning mist of the mind hovers.
Late in time, a half-ape looked down
and reached toward its face in water.
In self-destruction’s mirror, the self
might come to see itself.
Through a time when futures feel shattered,
to ask a day how a day might matter—
Sunlight passes over earth, oblivious of seeds,
says the seedling self—
says the rampike self—
From the many generations’ germinations,
the seeds of the I of the meant human
might split open, to stem, to root
in the harm of the world.
Seeds of the self-found self might lodge:
small, discovered telos
to lodge among starfields’
oblivious sprawl of night.
To learn to give more
than what is taken—
You must not destroy your world—
From lifeless oceans, susurrus tides
roiled over a later shore, to wash
as wind’s tides through canopies
of mountains’ slopes of trees.
Leaves would stir into a murmuring.
Leaves breathe their soughing
of time’s long wake of being—
of time’s long spell of being—
A breeze would breathe into a feeling—
aeolian breath of anamnesis.
Under the violent, nurturing sun,
leaves open in eyes’ seeing, to green
into meaning’s feeling.
A great gift was crafted
by oblivious eons, obliviously offered.
Mind was time’s long-crafted gift
finally given—obliviously entrusted.
From portents and prefigurements
is the crowning
of leaves risen, leafing into being
into a meaning-haunted world,
says the seedling self—
says the rampike self—
To live in temperate sunlight
falling brightly into meaning—
Morning mist melts into unclouding.
To hold the cup of being
under the sigil of the sun—
You must not destroy your world—
Shuffled cards blur. The futures reorder,
changing into changing
as the self begins to say.
v.
When the cathedral’s grand dome
dwindles to the skull’s dome
of the mere mind,
what is it to pray?
What are blessings
when they’re only feelings
stirred from time and earth?
May the blessings of time and earth
go with us.
May the blessings go with us
as we pass through time and as earth brings us
to know time and the earth
and to know ourselves.
Glancing might pause
to hold purity, looking
where the plain pine stands.
How old are you, truly, beautiful bird,
as you fly to me
out from the eons?
Together we found our way from there,
out from all of time’s
sun and ocean, shore and rain
beneath the sky of passing, reshaping clouds.
Birds’ vocables clear
through someone pausing to hear.
I feel how I live in light falling
from my sky’s sun
as my one star is swept among spirals’
galaxy after galaxy, discus after discus
flung through black voids
by no hand’s aim.
The unremembered, subterranean
strata rose into strata,
palimpsest rising layer into layer.
An ape is a man’s pentimento
there to be glimpsed, recognized,
in the layers of the self.
We must not destroy our world,
prays the self.
We must not destroy our world
because its fruit is beauty,
prays the self.
We would keep
the ancient, intricate world
that gave itself to us
and gave us to ourselves,
prays the self.
Mind of a species glinted
swimming toward wakening
in hypnopompic ascent.
On the cusp of all
of great time’s past and future,
the self would cobble
its redoubt of selfhood
at its decades’ borders.
May we learn to recognize
the images of oughtness
when spread before us like cards’ faces
telling of now and tomorrows.
May we love the world
branching from oblivion
to offer bright fruit
of love lived out in noticing.
Through our swift lives,
may what we choose to do and not do
be a power,
be a legacy
cast like a discus beyond ourselves.
May that power be our bond of living
we will cast beyond us
to give a future—
a good future given.
It might be a good
like that of a gaze cast up
to stars’ grand randomness,
as stars were cast to pass
through a mind seeing patterns
of charmed animals and heroes circling.
A time came when time changed
so that stars, unseen, would diminish
in no longer seeming grand hints
of shapes telling stars’ stories
of fabled animals and heroes.
Knowing the sky, to walk
under the overarching sky
as though to walk
beneath a towering good—
Life washed into sunlight. Life washed
from time onto time’s shore.
In a strange tale, a miracle of eyes
looked up to blind stars.
Blind stars were seen
passing through night’s sky
to gleam into pentacles on cards.
Like fireflies blinking
through a summer night,
selves would emerge into their desire
to brighten through meaning’s selfhood.
In one augury, searchers appear.
They might follow a future
into a fable of reaching a shore
where the annals of Aprils
would be illumined
by sunlight’s clemency falling,
days falling like cards
becoming destiny’s found days—
becoming destiny’s meant days—
Daniel Corrie’s poems have appeared in The American Scholar, Denver Quarterly, Hudson Review, Image, Kenyon Review, Missouri Review, Shenandoah, Southern Review, Southwest Review, Terrain.org, and Virginia Quarterly Review. He and his wife live on their Georgia farm.Read other long poems by Daniel Corrie also published in Terrain.org: “Longleaf, Laniakea”, “Swimming at Night”, “Words of Time, Book of Fire”, and “The Ancient Surge of Stars and Night Opens as All Being’s Single Bloom”. And read William Wright’s review of Words, World and For the Future.
Original header image by Sergey Nivens, courtesy Shutterstock. Photo of Daniel Corrie by Ellen Corrie.
