Marly Youmans
Both Sides of the River
As many have noted
Over the last several thousand years,
The Book of Revelation
Has some rather strange things to say,
But perhaps the rarest, most wonder-worked
Has to do with the river
That runs singing through a city of gold,
Its banks crowned with a tree
That springs up on both sides at once,
Lifting up new fruit each month.
The journey-man poet
Henri Michaux
Once gave to his magi
Power to skip along both sides of a river
At once; clever
Thief of words, to steal
Abilities from the Tree of Life…
Clench shut your eyes and imagine
Yourself as tree
That spires on two banks at once,
Casting a canopy over river and street.
Go ahead, delve and press
Your roots under street, under river…
Be expansive, be abundant,
Fountaining, splashing upward,
Tossing up leaves and juggling orbs
In starless, moonless Lamb-light.
Or train to be a Michaux-magi
And wander in the green grace of grass
On both sides of the river:
You, simultaneous and yet one.
(To confess, to digress
With a most unfortunate truth,
Michaux the poet-traveler
Never managed to walk the two banks,
Not by Seine or Shinano,
Huang He or Ganges.)
How shall you master the trick, either
As tree or as magi?
Disperse into a cloud of fine drops?
Spring apart into atoms? Hard,
But still a cheat. Doppelgänger? No, also false,
For whether tree or magi, there’s only the one way:
Simply be in both places.
Neither tree nor magi
Are precisely
As they may seem:
Nor even you. You with your branch
Of veins, your humming blood-sap…
Come closer to me, under
The wind-tossed shadow of leaves,
And listen: I can't whisper how to walk
On both sides of the singing river,
For riddles must be
Learned, earned in long
East-of-sun, west-of-moon
Mad fairy-tale journeys
Or starlit wrestlings with angels
Or sometimes by accident,
As when an innocent mind tumbles
Into the vertical blue of wells.
And if for one fleck of time
You stand tiptoe on both sides of a river,
You won’t master the mystery.
Always, there’s a residue, something
Hidden in sight,
Brimming with sunshine
Or collecting cloud-shadows
Like the leaf-silt, spell-silt
That fell through golds and ambers
In a fortuneteller’s teacup--
The scribe, the maker
Of resistant, radiant messages
Impossible to read.
Both Sides of the River
As many have noted
Over the last several thousand years,
The Book of Revelation
Has some rather strange things to say,
But perhaps the rarest, most wonder-worked
Has to do with the river
That runs singing through a city of gold,
Its banks crowned with a tree
That springs up on both sides at once,
Lifting up new fruit each month.
The journey-man poet
Henri Michaux
Once gave to his magi
Power to skip along both sides of a river
At once; clever
Thief of words, to steal
Abilities from the Tree of Life…
Clench shut your eyes and imagine
Yourself as tree
That spires on two banks at once,
Casting a canopy over river and street.
Go ahead, delve and press
Your roots under street, under river…
Be expansive, be abundant,
Fountaining, splashing upward,
Tossing up leaves and juggling orbs
In starless, moonless Lamb-light.
Or train to be a Michaux-magi
And wander in the green grace of grass
On both sides of the river:
You, simultaneous and yet one.
(To confess, to digress
With a most unfortunate truth,
Michaux the poet-traveler
Never managed to walk the two banks,
Not by Seine or Shinano,
Huang He or Ganges.)
How shall you master the trick, either
As tree or as magi?
Disperse into a cloud of fine drops?
Spring apart into atoms? Hard,
But still a cheat. Doppelgänger? No, also false,
For whether tree or magi, there’s only the one way:
Simply be in both places.
Neither tree nor magi
Are precisely
As they may seem:
Nor even you. You with your branch
Of veins, your humming blood-sap…
Come closer to me, under
The wind-tossed shadow of leaves,
And listen: I can't whisper how to walk
On both sides of the singing river,
For riddles must be
Learned, earned in long
East-of-sun, west-of-moon
Mad fairy-tale journeys
Or starlit wrestlings with angels
Or sometimes by accident,
As when an innocent mind tumbles
Into the vertical blue of wells.
And if for one fleck of time
You stand tiptoe on both sides of a river,
You won’t master the mystery.
Always, there’s a residue, something
Hidden in sight,
Brimming with sunshine
Or collecting cloud-shadows
Like the leaf-silt, spell-silt
That fell through golds and ambers
In a fortuneteller’s teacup--
The scribe, the maker
Of resistant, radiant messages
Impossible to read.
Marly Youmans's fourteenth book, her fifth collection of poems—a sequence centered on the mysterious Red King, the transforming Fool, and the ethereal Precious Wentletrap—is The Book of the Red King (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2019.) Forthcoming in 2020 is a novel, Charis in the World of Wonders. http://www.thepalaceat2.blogspot.com.