And Don’t Be Deaf to the Singing Beyond

Ed al cantar di là, non siate sorde.
Angel in Flames to Dante, Purgatorio 27.12

You never could tell what my deaf Uncle Arthur heard.
That Sunday when the black storm-cloud came at us,
He sat there churning butter by the bedroom window.
We saw this strange cloud way off west on the hills,
A little dark funnel with specks dancing round it.
“That’s only a big whirlwind,” he said with a smile.
Well, pretty soon we saw the specks were trees,
We heard this rumble like freight trains on a trestle,
But Uncle Arthur was deaf and wouldn’t believe us.
We ran like hell to the car and drove off east—
When hail and rain came blasting after to blind us,
He just sat there in the window, churning away.
Of course the storm passed before we got to the school
And ran down steps to stand in its flooded cellar—
So, wet up to our knees, we drove back home.
When we got in, he had two pounds of butter
All worked, salted, and molded onto dishes.
The funnel had passed a half-mile north and west,
Its swath—a quarter-mile wide of leveled blackjacks—
Went up and over the valley’s northern rim.
We drove up north to find out who’d been killed.
Out in the dirt yard of their paintless four-room house
Our Assembly of God friends were standing unharmed.
“We knelt and prayed, God turned his wrath aside,”
Their mother said. Who knows which tasted sweeter,
That Jersey butter from Uncle Arthur’s churn,
Or the name of God in Mrs. Parks’s mouth?
I still get peeved, thinking of what missed them
So close they saw the lightning up in its blackness,
And what we missed, down in that scorpion-filled cellar.
Well, when my Uncle Arthur died, years later,
A migrant Okie in Porterville, California,
My Aunt Jewell, his brother Woody’s wife,
Saw him collapse there with his coronary,
And when she ran up, he lay there on his back,
Turned his eyes to her, smiled, closed them, was dead.
“He was SO deaf,” she said, “and he saw my mouth
Just calling and calling, and seemed to think it was funny.”

© Carter Revard

Excerpt from Close Encounters 1.

We of the Osage Nation have come,
as the Naming Ceremony says,
down from the stars.
We sent ahead
our messengers to learn
how to make our bodies,
to make ourselves a nation,
find power to live, to go on,
to move as the sun rises and never fails
to cross the sky into the west
and go down in beauty into the night,
joining the stars once more
to move serenely across the skies
and rise against dawn, letting
the two great shafts of light beside the sun
become white eagles plumes in the hair
of children as we give their names.

When we came down, our messengers
encountered beings
who let us take their bodies
with which we live into the peaceful days.
We met the Thunder, and the Mountain Lion,
the Red Bird, and the Cedar Tree,
Black Bear, and Golden Eagle.
As eagles, we came down,
and on the red oak tops
we rested, shaking loose with our weight
great showers of acorns, seed
for new oaks, and our daily bread.

The leaves were light and dancing and
we saw, through the trees,
the sun caught
among leaves moving
around its light. It was
the leaves, we saw,
those light beings, who raised
as they danced the heavy
oak-trunks out of earth,
who gathered the wind and sunlight,
the dew and morning into timbered
lodges for the sun and stars.

And so, of course, we sang.
Nothing’s lighter than leaves, we sang,
ghost-dancing on the oak tree as the spirit moves,
and nothing heavier than the great
sun-wombing red oak which their dancing
in time has raised up from this earth where we
came down as eagles.
It will not end, we sang,
in time our leaves of paper will
be dancing lightly, making a nation of
the sun and other stars.

© Carter Revard