C.J. Allen

Life is Many Things at Once

Take that Shaker cupboard, the one with the drawers, hanging on a wall in Pennsylvania. Inside it’s dark like the universe or deep water; outside it’s plain deal. This is because the soul is not continuous and needs somewhere to rest. Sand is also interesting, and labours only to turn itself and everything else into finer and finer sand. ‘How is that going to help?’ I said to the fly as I watched it steadfastly refuse the opened window, then returned to my meditations.

For the duck’s legs, though short, cannot be lengthened

without causing distress to the duck, wrote Chang Tzu.

Did he mean, perhaps, that we should not struggle to exceed our destiny, that we should remain inert and serene, like Zen glazed fruit? Or are we dealing here with a non-metaphorical duck, a phenomenal, substantial, actual, factual duck? Life is many things at once. Sometimes twice. This was revealed to me as I watched Alice Cockerham’s six brown hens pecking and pecking at spots of rain that fell and continued to fall with random exactness onto the rust-coloured earth.

The Book of Days

Those were the days we called the Days of Nothing,

days of the chapel outing, the rain hesitating

for an hour or so. In the yard behind the house

rainwater pooled on the flags, an enamel bucket

filled with rain reflected the gentle heavens.

Those were the days we called the Days of the Gazing Moon,

Arcadian cattle sleeping beneath the trees,

beatific in metallic moonlight,

like something expressed in a poem by Hölderlin

or a famous painting by Caspar David Friedrich.

Those were the days we called the Days of Angels.

Why this was no-one seemed to care. The girls

were ordinary girls who wrapped things up quite nicely,

kept diaries, knew needlepoint, conspired

against each other while the boys were tender brutes.

Those were the days we called the Days of the New Stone Age,

days of potential and pebbles and being a part

of something. There was no entertainment of course;

there was little demand. But there were wolves and wolf-lore

learned from stories and songs that weren’t very good.

Those were the days we called the Days of Grievous Pastimes,

filled with longing for freedom then hating it when it arrived,

when success was crass and failure was simply failure

to appreciate success, and the long afternoons

were made longer by the application of tortuous syntax.

Those were the days we called the Days of Spelling,

Latinate days when language snored in a cupboard,

when grazing on chalk was a social accomplishment,

when herds of wildebeest dressed as grammar-school boys

swept across the playing-fields of time.

Those were the days we called the Days of the Age of Stars,

stellular days succeeding primordial darkness,

well-lit days when everyone could see everyone else

and eyed the world with calculation and envy,

impossible days we can only look back on and wonder.