Margaret Weis: The Second Generation

It is always the map of believing,
The white landscape
And the shrouded farms.
It is always the land of remembrance,
Of sunlight fractured
In old, immovable ice,
And always the heart,
Cloistered and southerly,
misgives the ice, the drifting
for something perplexed and eternal.
It will end like this,
the heart will tell you,
it will end with mammoth and glacier,
with ten thousand years
of effacing night,
and someday the scientists
rifling lakes and moraines,
will find us in evidence,
our relics the outside of history,
but your story, whole and hollowed, will end
at the vanishing edge of your hand.
So says the heart
in its intricate cell,
charting with mirrors
the unchartable land
of remembrance and rivers and ice.
This time it was different:
the town had surrendered
to the hooded snow,
the houses and taverns
were awash in the fragmented light,
and the lake was marbled
with unstable ice,
as I walked through drifts
through lulling spirits,
content with the slate of the sky
and the prospect of calendared spring.
It will end like this,
the winter proclaimed,
sooner or later
in dark, inaccessible ice,
and you are the next one
to hear this story,
winter and winter
occluding the heart,
and there in Wisconsin,
mired by the snow
and by vanishing faith,
it did not seem bad
that the winter was taking
all light away,
that the darkness seemed welcome
and the last, effacing snow.

He stood in the midst
of frozen automobiles,
cars lined like cenotaphs.
In a bundle of coats
and wool hats and mufflers
he rummaged the trunk
for God knows what,
and I knew his name
by the misted spectacles,
the caved, ridiculous
hat he was wearing,
And whether the courage
was spring in its memory,
was sunlight in promise
or whiskeyed shade,
or something aligned
beyond snow and searching,
it was with me that moment
as I spoke to him there;
in my days I am thankful
it stood me that moment
as I spoke to the bundled
weaver of accidents,
the everyday wizard
in search of impossible spring.
Tracy, I told him, poetry lies
in the seams of the story,
in old recollections and prospect
of what might always and never be
(And those were the words
I did not say, but poetry lies
in the prospect of what should have been:
you must believe that I said these words
past denial, past history),
and there in the winter
the first song began,
the moons twined and beckoned
on the borders of Krynn,
the country of snow
resolved to the grasslands
more brilliant and plausible.
And the first song continued
through prospects of summer,
where the promise returns
from the vanished seed,
where the staff returns
from forgetful deserts,
and even the northern lands
cry out to the spirit,
this is the map
of believing fulfilled;
this is the map of belief.

At the edge of the world
the juggler wanders,
sightless and pathless,
trusting the venerable
breadth of his juggler’s hands.
He wanders the edge
of a long-ago story, juggling moons,
parading the fixed
anonymous stars in his passage.
Something like instinct
and something like agate
hard and transparent
in the depths of his reflexes
channels the objects
to life in the air:
stilettos and bottles,
wooden pins and ornaments
the seen and the unseen—all reassemble
translated to light and dexterity.
It is this version of light we steer by:
constellations of memory
and a chemistry born
in the blood’s alembic,
where motive and metaphor
and the impulse of night
are annealed by the morning
into our countenance,
into the whorls
of our surfacing fingers.
Something in each of us yearns for this balance,
for the vanished chemistries that temper the steel.
The best of all jugglery lies in the truces
that shape our intention out of knives,
out of filament out of half-empty bottles
and mirrors and chemistries,
and from the forgotten ore of the night.