Out of the Depths
by Richard Jackson
From the bottom of the lungs these words
whose meanings search for the unknown,
from ravines of doubt scooped out from
the Cumberlands,
from the chasms of fear pocking
the Dolomites,
these clefts in courage, these
depths of despair,
from under these fog-bound
Smokies hiding their own truths.
How often
we find ourselves in dead-end alleyways,
mistaking policy for belief,
caves for gates.
The way the sea searches for its end
and its beginning,
or how mountains claw
their way towards the sky,
when the night
window gives us back only our selves with
a dark Rembrandt background
finding
only the empty space a ring surrounds,
how often we walk along strange paths
trying to follow dissolving footprints,
how often faith appears and disappears
like fireflies,
like dreams that drip with
the rain from the tips of leaves,
the cries
of humpback whales sounding down into,
and surfacing momentarily from the abyss.
From all these, a cry emerges, like a yell
from the bottom of an abandoned well,
like nestlings calling for their mother,
but then, every once in a while, the gust of
a memory we never had,
the path left
by dead glaciers,
the momentary world
lit beneath our closed eyelids,
a light
squeezing its way through a thicket of
branches,
the sparrow’s seee-chip
telling us to see beyond seeing,
and so
our words for all this, like snowflakes
touching the earth, dissolving their shape.
From all these, from the sinkhole of the heart’s
failing words, a shriek, a cry, Lord,
this a prayer made from the breath of sighs.
Richard Jackson is the author of 17 books of poetry including The Heart as Framed: New and Select Poems, and 12 books of essays, interviews, translations, editions and anthologies. Winner of Guggenheim, Fulbright, NEA, NEH and Witter Bynner Fellowships, and the Order of Freedom from the President of Slovenia for his literary and humanitarian work during the Balkan wars; he has also edited 30 chapbooks from eastern European poets, and his poems have been translated into 17 languages.
