Lines
Travelogue
Selva Oscura
The curve of a vase repeats the line of a shoulder.
Thought is not reliable but if not thought what?
Crisp light. Cold air. The willow wands in wind flex and tense.
The silver threads a burin uncoils are swept up into a nest.
Memento, we say, meaning to bear in mind.
A fortune is squandered on a feverish trade in tulips.
Pine, bamboo, and plum: ice inches into the river.
Nothing will be as before. With a wet rag the chalkboard is wiped clean.
You are offered a glimpse, a narrow slice of landscape framed in the instant before the train doors close. The roads and paths lost beneath snow. Around you the murmur continues as if conversation exercises culled and dutifully repeated from an out of print textbook. And when the train stops next and the doors open the view is another, meaning at once different and the same, thus the unresolved tension, like a feedback loop of damage recovered data, is recurrent more than constant, its intended function exhausted. As if to recall a long forgotten presence, some uncertain state between emerging and disappearing, you have set your sights on what extends beyond the pictorial field. On the tip of your tongue, meaning what lingers just out of reach, snippets of a folk song sung to see how, once circulated, it returns changed. Although the track is straight, you are asked to navigate by way of random coordinates, to feed the fire whatever burns. The embedded narrative is unacknowledged, yet you know from experience the bridge is out ahead, the track ends’ snarled.
The dull, overcast-ness of the day registers as mute. The wood’s edge obscures the view, if it is not itself the view. And if so, how quickly evening gathers like weather beyond the line of oaks. The picture plane’s narrow limitations give way to an illusion of depth, an into that just might be entered, and entered—the air flecked with moss spores and leaf dust—surrendered to. One is a shade absorbed into shade.
Eric Pankey is the author of numerous books of poems, most recently Augury and Crow-Work. His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared widely in such journals and anthologies as the New Yorker, Kenyon Review, Iowa Review, and Poetry Daily, as well as several anthologies, including Best American Poetry. A recipient of the Walt Whitman Award, Pankey has been awarded fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Ingram Merril Foundation. A 1983 graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, he is a professor of English and the Heritage Chair in Writing at George Mason University and resides in Fairfax, Virginia.
