Sentence Fragments

Along the creek’s floor, trees
Standing or strewn like battle-fallen
Against the banks, their leaves,
A blood-carpet, and we, striding
Like child priests in cathedral afternoons
Of light, of green, gold, and red
Casting shadows of mysterium
Among altar stones—  
The raven’s harraw, heron’s harraaahnk
Trumpetings enough, and cardinal’s
Trilling bells enough to accompany
Our naive yet deliberate progress--
 
In that light, as if we’d fought as we might
Against a jabberwock, against hordes
Of shadow-beasts with flaming eyes--
In that place, yet innocent of blood
And fear, as if we’d braved a hell
To spare the rabbits and the robins,
The shy coons, or the muskrats whom
We ruled without decree or possession,
Who did only as they knew, and lived— 
If we had been content thus for all time
To be their observing administrators--
 
Now we, saddened at our progress,
Interrupted, staggered and staggering,
After years, after days and hours
Of remembering with a clarity of vision
Startled by things gone wrong,
Imprisoned by the sins of our grandfathers,
Snared in conflicts with our fathers,
Hooked and netted by sins of our own,
Unliberated yet from the fragments
Of our sentences remaining unserved,
Remembering--
 
A young man walking, and in walking,
Emergent as if from a dream, awakening--
Who, searching for the right effect,
Grasping for the righteous affect
Of his becoming and of his cause--
 
And stepping, each generation of him,
Into what Frontier epic of Freedom,
Expansion, and Empire accomplished,
Along what labyrinth of clover-leafs,
Beneath what profusion of billboards,
What montage of storefront signs
Leading all to his belly or groin,
His whole earth compressed
By internet to ad space, an empire
Of capital promising and promising--
 
And having searched in vain
For some new West, beyond
His father’s fathers’ deep-cut trail,
With no bones of bison, grizzly,
Or elk littering the plains and passes,
No sad relics of Iroquois, Comanche,
Blackfoot, or Tlingit strewn underfoot
As evidence of his father’s crimes--
Having seen the African blooms
Uprooted, the petals scattered
And still unreconciled--
 
Stopping short, with no frontier
To cut and blunder through,
No destiny manifesting itself
In open prairie and mountain range,
No Plymouth shores waiting, virginal,
To stab an innocent flag upon--
Grown old in history, therefore,
Before he learned to speak
His own story--
 
This young man, standing
In a year of thirty-five wars,
Just days beyond the century of war,
Of mass graves and mass weapons
As the pinnacle of our evolution,
Of reefs dead and forests dying,
Memorials to our having lived--
 
This young man, frenetic, angry
In his new century, his new millennium,
Stepping yet in no direction, waiting
Among the shards of cultures,
Of peoples still drawn by Western lure
And strewn across the world, their faces
Reduced to the simulacra of billboard
And the plastic detritus of gift shop,
Their voices lost in the noise of internet,
The static of relentless television— 
 
This young man, still hearing the call
To serve, to save everything,
At the cusp of too late for anything,
Stepping again, though warily,
As if entering once more a forest
Along the creek’s bank, but littered
Now with generations of bald tires
And mud-choked washing machines
Dating back, model after model,
Recounting the whole history of machine,
The creek floor papered in old fliers,
Placards and handbills of defunct regimes--
 
He, alert but waiting, hearing as well
The familiar harroon of blue heron,
Herald of hope yet lingering
Among reeds, in the silted stream
And crawdad pools, sullied and shrunken,
Nature, yet asserting herself, wooing
And ravishing him with glimpses
Of Eden, while crying for her redemption--
 
If we should ask now who
Will lead him to the right effect,
Will stand as the righteous affect
Of his becoming and of his cause,
Will liberate him from the fragments
Of his sentence and speak his life
to a point--
 
And if he, himself the monstrance,
Yet hungering for the host, called out,
Asking where you were, Jesus the Christ,
Recreator of every old thing and new,
And you answered--
                                   Then--