Down in the White of the Tree by Tim Myers

Author:Tim Myers
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
Published: 2018-10-09T14:24:20+00:00

On January 6th

I called out

in grief and

the silence of

an empty world,

Lord!—

Through graylight winter air

heard, felt nothing,

went gray with gray

hunger, mute

whine of it

inside me,

until, gaunt in that

bony January wind,

I suddenly heard Him

there and quiet in

my own voice

Capitola Beach, New Year's Day '03

On the day traditionally set aside

for taking stock and recovery from drinking

(not hard to see the connection there),

we walked the flat shell-strewn beach

in easy winter sunlight with that

summery Californian intimation of paradise.

Barefoot amid sparkling rivulets and foam-wash,

we laughed and talked, till one of our sons

(soon to graduate college, the other already on his own)

called to us from tumbled rocks near the cliffside, pointing.

We crossed to him—gasped. There in paler rock

within a dark boulder, but clear even to

the tiny porousness of bone:

a fossil vertebra bigger than my hand:

whale.

We soon found more:

a chain of smaller vertebrae, spine-pieces

diminishing along the ancient beast’s tail.

Then someone stumbled on

a larger section of the long-dead back,

every inch clear as print to read in the book of the rock.

A local expert later told us

he’d never seen that fossil before,

that currents and winter surf are always churning up

new marvels on that beach,

the layers there three to five million years old.

We stood before it, hearts pounding.

I put my hand out, touched what was once

the knuckles of that sea-heaving back,

imagining how the colossal muscled torso

hung along the delicate boneline—

foolishly reached for a name to call him—

across those millions of years found only

whale

Even as we chirped like birds, happy in our discovery,

we all mourned his end, I think, in secret,

aggrieved that death had etched him into stone,

shrunk his great ocean-roaming life to this pale imprint—

but sensing more, we felt that storm-rush of wonder,

in the backward abysm catching at something,

our little minds reeling, hearts suddenly

so much bigger than they usually are…

I take the nameless whale now

as one of my saints. I have questions for him.

They rise in me like something

deep currents keep bringing back to sunlit shores.

Self by its nature cries out to know the Mystery

that left this whale here as if

some great, mute, singing ghost-bird.

The more I become myself, the more I become

a series of simple mysterious questions

hung from a backbone of passionate sacred curiosity—

and someday, of course, will myself be no morethan

small bones singing why.

That’s the birdsong of self.

And what will my own bones learn,

waiting quietly in the earth like his,

as whole ages teeter and slip away,

seas eat at new Americas,

stars flicker on and off like each spring’s flowers?

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