Spiral Path
These white rock chips, raked smooth, make a spiral path
beside the retreat center’s garden—a path, the owners say,
good for mind-calming walks. But walking, I wonder:
Did these milky shards come from the canyon’s east end
where in these hills our dawns arrive, where the northward
mountainside’s long been flayed and scraped? I’ve watched
machines crawling the gouged scarps like famished insects
out of the early Triassic, year after year unearthing a massive
vacancy, turning the cliff-face into money, into how many
stones under how many feet of how many walkers? (Let it
go. Breathe.) I count my steps. Ignore the blue jay’s jeer,
the ground squirrel’s chitter and whistle. And the spiral
tightens. I approach the center-point of the path’s coiled
watch-spring, touch it, then turn back. A faint breeze.
Pine bough shadows swim on the path like fish in a stream.
*
I walk slower. No end in mind, only the steady side-to-side
of motion, subtle pull of the path’s turning. I lean into it,
the shape of its flow. A breath, a breath … then out
of some book read ages ago, a grainy gray photo
floats up: an ancient Ligurian quarry above Carrara.
The Roman conquest of that region yielded centuries
of white Luna marble, from which were made their mighty
buildings and statues of Latin gods—all to out-do the Greeks,
whose defeat and subjugation were never enough to ease
the Roman sense of lack in art and religion, mediocrity
that haunted senators and emperors, their minds eaten out
by a ravening hunger and a lust for control. Why else banish
your greatest poet to the Black Sea? Why thrust slaves
into hollow brass bulls and stoke fires under them, treating
dinner guests to their sizzling screams? No surprise then
that thirty-some Roman rulers were murdered in office—
poisoned, stabbed, gutted, fed to dogs … only their effigies
propped up at funerals and praised as if alive. Would a spiral
path of rock chips to walk have helped to make them wiser?
Am I any wiser on the spiral path? I can see the end of it
ten feet away, and slow a bit more. Delay, and delay….
*
“Standing still,” we say. Yet we can feel the Earth rolling
like a marble in a funnel, in the vortex our middling star
drags behind it: planets, moons, comets, dust … flying
through the void at 700 miles per second. No “still point
of the turning world”! Only this leaning into the spiral path,
ache of the effort to drag behind us our personal vortex
teeming with memories, longings, aspirations, regrets:
each life like a quarry in some mountain above Carrara
where we mine such stuff as our little dreams are made on.
.
The Thief of Voices
— after Tadeusz Różewicz
when the Thief of Voices
turned up in town, a local TV talk-show host
famous for his edgy snideness
mugged and joked
This Thief … he’d make a fine
sidekick—and the next morning awoke
stricken dumb
therefore
the Singers Union
scraped together a modest bribe
enough to leave their members free
to carol through Christmas
in secret
the City Council voted the Thief
a fat tax break
then amid flashing cameras and microphone bouquets
announced historic Main Street henceforth
would be known as
Thief of Voices Boulevard
but soon enough voices started again
being torn up by the roots
even after the christening of Thief Avenue
Thief Street
Big Thief Way
until the City Council (grown sick
of public meetings full of raging voters
their raw grunts and stabbing
middle fingers) resigned
en masse and in fiery
voicelessness
only here and there
pairs of lovers aching for the nothings
they used to furtively whisper
relearned the shy glances and winks
and the come-hither arching of eyebrows
that in before-times had served them so well
it was that wordless code that so
stung the Thief of Voices
so abashed him that one gray morning he
huffed away
bound for a neighboring town
rumored to be more welcoming of silence
more quietly desperate
when he came to the iron bridge
over the bordering river
the Thief—as ever on such occasions—paused
to ponder his vagabond life
his strange need
and webbed in winter tree shadows
stood slightly swaying
face rapt
with introspection
although in the end (as always) he
shook off his low mood and with a jaunty gait
took to the bridge
a pinch of wormwood tucked
between tongue and cheek
and from the back of his throat unleashed
a flurry of splintery screeches
like a mateless magpie
.
Joseph Hutchison, Colorado Poet Laureate (2014-2019), has published eleven chapbooks and eight full collections, most recently Under Sleep’s New Moon; The World As Is: New & Selected Poems, 1972-2015; and Marked Men. His poems have appeared widely in journals—including Adirondack Review, New York Quarterly, Naugatuck River Review, Pedestal, and Poetry Salzburg Review — and in numerous anthologies, including New Poets of the American West and A Ritual to Read Together: Poems in Conversation with William Stafford. He directs the Professional Creative Writing online program at the University of Denver’s University College and lives in the mountains southwest of Denver.
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Stone Poetry Quarterly 