[lit-ideas] Monday poem

                Sennacherib

Ahead are seven gates and twelve double-doors.
At each portal clothing is removed or jewelry;
through the doors, a land of shades;
beyond, an unbounded palace of daylight
where you smile and drink dark tea
above traffic and the hushed breath of trees.


Shanina-la-ishu: there is nothing like it
but the tablets of destiny hold whirlwinds
as far from Christ as you from the Crusades
this time you treasure like an heirloom in an ivory box
this land of glass and lights and rockets --
the great fish, brother of Leviathan, supporting Kujira
the giant bull, whose back holds a ruby rock,
on which stands an angel on whose shoulders rest the earth,
your town, your quiet precinct of lamplight,
the perimeter of your heart,
where outer and inner walls still stand.


It wasn't mere war that brought you to this land, naked,
not crested sky or the damp funnel of oceans on the reef.
Each soul is sweet value and is sanctified always,
the indemnity being a loyal vassal's charge through time.


He was a man "of clever understanding"
inheriting his father's wars as you inherit
yours, these hands of a dark testament,
as you inherit carpenter's tools and gray eyes.


Beyond your window trash trucks strain
to crush what is left of you, what
you overlook thoughtless, dim, another
double-door. Midnight goes as you knew it
would, ectogenous, amplified, a puzzle.


On the interstate in summer the pounding
highway calls to white bellies of stars.
Steel rails limn your haunting of shot towns,
tangled wires on a lone streetlight hung near
the dark gas station. At last you beach on familiar signs,
an island of sodium lights and concrete --
this is Utah maybe or Delaware.
This is your reward.


A door opens and you are in the house of a loved one
decades earlier. The house is condemned.
You are not loved. You are not insane.
Bats feast on insects under corner lights.
Your longing is a pressed flower.


Dead air pulls across the dark threshold
lecithin, parsley, dried apricots, copper:
She learned hypnosis in her last year.
You will never know why.


Black-and-white photos of this past surface
as you sort through your dead father's attic.
Outside your window, a single crow
facing south, insists on itself for hours.


Sennacherib: the god Sin substitutes the
dead brothers. For what? You are the third son,
the first to survive childhood. When you are ten your
mother explains that you were her last attempt
to have a child. Of course you were. Of course.


Prisoners of war rebuilt his city,
Nineveh, the city Jonah feared, he extended,
beautified, irrigated, ringed with fruit trees
and exotic plants on the east bank of the Tigris
under the emblem of Ishtar.
We cannot love the same thing or even try.


"The Destruction of Sennacherib" a poem by Byron
has anapests dancing to the biblical tale though
other sources don't endorse a story of two wars.
Herodotus writes of mice and scholars read plague.
You skim these murmuring voices and see
your death alone in a hospital room, debased by drugs,
the cold nurses worried about their own health care.


If we were always younger thinking ourselves better
gifted with a clear past because wider or new
double-doors would not close on darkness. Yet
our antiquity demands these regrets and
in milking its own process, repopulates.


A spring night in your small town
you were insurgent, reconnoitering
in alleys, shunning headlights
scouting under the skirt of ancient pines.
You drop into shadow near the school
hidden in a concrete well outside the library.
You fish the glass cutter from a pocket
trace circles on the pane, the glass powders
but doesn't cut, and sport sours as you fear
to do more. For the next twenty years
you will enter libraries the same way,
though you will always use the door.


He sent armies against Elam and Chaldea.
After nine months of assault
Babylon fell to him and kept falling.
He took the city apart like a toy and
raked the countryside with massacres.
God's Instrument as Isaiah called him.
Of course he was. Of course.


In January in Boston at the end of hope,
you sat editing film and filling journals
and could not go out to save your lover,
would not take that step into the world.
There was always snow and another theory.
There was always the room and something
you wanted. Something you wanted ... what?
You did not meet your lover again for ten years
and then only to forgive and say good-bye.


What's a king to do? Become the toppling of a statue?
The Clay Prism of Sennacherib tells how
he brought cotton to Nineveh, brought alabaster,
brought timber, devised a new way to pour bronze
in moulds, a new way to raise water from wells.
His sons killed him as you knew they would.
His sons killed him.


He is here now. You are standing at your door.
The moment is yours now.
Light washes everything golden.
You feel its pressure on your forehead.
The sun rises on yellow blinds and curtains
sights and colors, rises, the broad clean hope
of sky, rises, a baby's eyes in river sparkle
rises from cloud and orange glint of jet
and more and more and more
the sun on stones on tones of voices
and the doors open to a brilliant form
floating a dance, a shout, a song,
vaulted, gorgeous, loving, present
tender, a dream of all forever
willing, touching, growing, praising.
Come in.






(c)2000 Eric Yost

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