DOVE OF THE MORNING NEWS by Bruce Bond
Click on Pierre Teilhard de Chardin,
and you find a man whose Christ has a body,
and that body is not finished growing.
The surface of modern earth lies below
a glow of talk and optic fiber, the angel
of our noosphere, engorged and breathing,
metastasized into intelligent machines,
the throes of fevers arcing our backs,
contagions of our traffic raised, curved,
shuttled through the crossed emergent roar
of light. You see what de Chardin saw,
our circuits cast in one great nervous system
of the whole, flags of contrails flowing over
cities, the blood of strangers into streams
of smoke that flood the boundaries we call strange.
* * *
What is the will to live if not the means
and meaning of the bridge, what if not
a common fire beneath the stanchions,
the sharp green scent of a burst of rain.
Yesterday my wife fainted in the market.
She shattered her bottles, broke her jaw,
and the many strangers rushed to her
to offer her bandages, an ambulance call,
the wordless reparation of her groceries.
Without the mask or glove of our season,
an old man knelt in his boy- blue supermarket
vest, and she said, thank you, please,
do not touch me. She can feel it still,
that hand. When she lies down, it lies down
beside her. Like a beast beside a child.
* * *
What good is our proximity to heaven
if it sends no word. Only the winds
of Chernobyl over northern Europe,
the air that binds, that empties what it fills,
fevers the autumns of New England
like a plague. What you cannot see
you see in the eyes of the paralyzed,
the drift of the garbage, the uplifted
hair and banners on the White House lawn.
You hear it in our cattle like a train
to somewhere, though no one says just where.
And you know it will not last, the air
for the taking, but you were born to it,
for the cry to clear your lung of spit
and blood, to search for the right words to breathe.
* * *
After bombs beat the many precincts
of our town to cinders, the charred bricks
stood in jagged monoliths or scattered
across the roads that carried us survivors
by foot. In search of what, hard to tell,
the living, the dead, the unknown neighbor.
After the weary initiation of repairs,
as the wreckage cooled and peace received
its signatures, a chill swept over us,
a shared sense of what we suffered, lost,
what we saw in the random casualty.
The deep sensation of the irrevocable
haunted small greetings among strangers.
Blood banks drained, and filled, and filled again.
When one eye shuddered, so too another.
* * *
The earth below the throat is paradise,
said a child of the age of permission,
and I worried, and then, he died
of the shame and sacrament he drank,
alone, divided against the voice that says,
you can love a heaven and hate its god.
You can vacate the house and chronic
rancor of your childhood and pause,
look up, hypnotized beneath the white
glass of trees, not knowing what it is
you know. I cannot quite recall, we say,
speaking on behalf of a fog that floats
rock, silk, and heroin across the ocean.
I cannot, says the wind, or some lost soul
who walks the earth, never touching down.
* * *
Where a mind divides, so too a hood
or national prayer breakfast where the word
love becomes a matter of contention.
We were born, after all, into the flesh
whose mission, like a meal, reminds us:
eat, sleep, tweet, do what you must do
to live. Like a gerrymandered district
or parish of dollars earmarked for promotion.
Small wonder we look up from pancakes
and prayer in disbelief at our poor choices.
I too feel lost, listening for the danger,
like any bank or church or living thing.
I feel this new and quiet desperation
enter the room, if only to whisper, here
I am. Like a phantom limb, here, here.
* * *
I love the tenor of talk in the morning
café where I drink mine black and read,
in the news, that scientists have found
a little cavern in the word whole,
it was there all along, unlike its cousin
complete, the entire room now full
of mouths opening and closing and if
you look down a throat, deep, you see
the shadow of the person in the name
and in the friend, once, whose pain was
so singular the doctors could not get
their scope past the scarring of the wine.
They could not tunnel to the issue, and so
he sighed, relieved, his whole body relaxed,
then fell back into darkness once again.
* * *
When I find our congregation online,
the swastika sprayed across the playground,
I know, the new proximities are here.
The velocity of money and bad ideas,
they feed a conflagration of stars, crosses,
fast machines, and plow them into crowds.
I too lost a friend in Pittsburg to talk
so deadly it turned into a man, a creature
of garbled anger in the chatroom dark.
The new proximities travel at the speed
of bullets stripped of jackets and the chamber,
the new noosphere an aurora of texts
around a planet that does what planets do,
what bodies do when a stranger enters
shul to wipe the faces from their bones.
* * *
Dear puritans of a perfect social order,
I too have felt distracted at the party
that is, granted, one imperfect space.
Ever the guy who reddens with important
views, or waxes on about their dull
vacation, but hey, we are forgiving here,
a bit messed up and grateful to be safe.
Policemen of the human heart, thank you.
You deserve a break, so take one. Please.
I will remember fondly your vigilance.
I will see myself in you, and then. I won’t.
Because we are just unspeakably different
and lay our sacks of skin into dreams
that are genuine, odd, or odd enough
to reach the unheard voice and whisper, yes.
* * *
The pursuit of happiness makes time
a blur of consequences, as heaven is
for one believer, and utopia for others.
In other words, an idea, like a house:
in this life, we say. Or are you happy,
when it feels small to answer, yes or no.
Tonight, I learned a great woman died,
a nurse who caught the fever of a patient,
and I wonder how she felt about a world
she left untouched, unfinished and afraid.
Every day will be the one she missed,
the deed undone, the calling she passed on.
Every year will bring the hour she changed
the bedpan of another, in a white room
called happiness, in which she disappears.
* * *
Here, between abysses of enormity
and the quantum small, a child is born.
A figure so intricate we cannot see
where matter ends, life begins, a body
stands to walk from evolution’s flow chart
into a room, late, with a table, a lamp,
a sheet of paper, a hearth for the fire
to lay the skeletons of last night’s dream.
The new sublime is a place like this,
an abyss that eats the sun and grass.
I have traveled a great distance to arrive
here, in this garden of black flowers, to say,
I am sorry, to the widow on behalf
of no one, nothing, everything, death,
the part gone speechless for whom I speak.
* * *
The abyss of synthesis, de Chardin
called it, the dark and darker labyrinth
you see wherever you see life, as if,
through the lens of a new science set
to music, we could fall in love again,
revive, in our basilica of nerves,
the marriage of mind to some first star,
here, in a coffee shop named Aura.
An abyss of design so fine, it opens up
the O’s of awe in holy counterpoint.
But what of the maze that lies there still
when the eye closes. The veil of flies
descends. Cats wander the empty house.
What of the kilowatt that cannot kick
a stone- white heart back into the world.
* * *
When I first saw the Sistine Chapel,
I saw a great room inside a smaller.
I saw a god inside the need for god,
and so, one man, high in the scaffolds,
on his back and painting the flesh tones
of lovers into us, their afterlife.
I took them home, reimagined them
whenever I speak of gods and angels.
Call paradise a bridge over waters
in whom the shadows of the girders float
and lay a cooler weather on the river.
I too have felt that from a stranger.
I have heard a radio playing in a far
room a cheerful and infectious tune,
though I cannot find that room, not yet.
* * *
Dear philosopher of the noosphere,
I love you. And I worry about the axis
of pure white light driven through the planet,
how we breathe it when we whisper: love.
I want to believe in the evolution
of kindness, that it grows more and more
complex in its affections for the strange.
The problem with paradise is the one
good bar where each is every, plus one.
But we live in uncertain times. Therefore
tyrants, purges, plagues that quarantine
our angels. Yes, I know. You are dead.
But stay in touch. All that is beautiful
bespeaks a bit of chaos. Text me. Call.
For we are different, thank the stars. Between us.
* * *
When Lao bid farewell to Confucius,
he said, Friend, go easy on the dogma.
Remember, laws create the criminal.
But if laws are bad, what of the lawless
precincts of criminals at war, the lions
at heart who unhinge the prison gate.
Precisely, said Lao, the mind at war.
What of the bitter narcissist in office,
the bully, the baby, the wall, the eternal
disappointment who could not please his father.
Seek the lowest places, Lao said.
Be like the river as it falls. And then
he left. And between philosophers,
a tenderness opened. A prison filled.
The blood of millions wandered to the sea.
* * *
No evolutionary future awaits except
in association with everyone else. I read
that once. I was hoping for a picture.
I was hoping for a speaker just close
enough, in the sweet spot of the seen.
The icon of my Christ links to Virgil
to Jove. The spirit of each is none alone.
Like earth that way, aflame in the eyes
of machines, and our eyes looking back.
When I look back, when de Chardin looks
my way, I feel a little powerless,
pointless, like clicking like beside a fact,
as if it needs me. It needs more friends
and feels nothing. No favorite, no cold.
I google everyone, and my cursor freezes.
* * *
To touch the untouchable, our hands,
invisibly inked, pressed into a record
no one reads, each anonymous labor,
each microscopic kindness or mistake,
scattered in one continuous departure,
is this what we want, to be everywhere
and nowhere, always dissolving, always
arriving, leaving like faces in the mirrors
of the nursing home. Always in the air,
ashes from a mountain, long repressed,
falling as a coastal rain, without sound,
and you feel it, smell it, the small winged
consequence of everything, and nothing
untainted, undisturbed, and the smoke
in your eye turns to water, and you follow.
* * *
Long ago, de Chardin dreamt he would
die one Easter, and, indeed, he did.
He loved the iconography of ending
with a question. And a room of heads
would nod to hear a query rise, like balloons
across an April lawn in the silence after.
But that is another story. What I mean
to say is. He was talking with a friend.
Before he died, he reddened with wine,
toasting time as a journey toward a chat
like this. And then his arm went numb.
His chest ached. His friend got up to catch
the man who fell like a dime in a fountain.
It was just that quick, and like a friend,
the whole sky broke. And took the silver in.
* * *
Something for the ferry, for the moon
laid down across the eyelid of the sun.
Something for the garden to comfort
the beloved arranged in neighborhoods
named for the faith of lives who visit.
Something for a name engraved against
the quiet of the yard, the hollow place
burrowed through the halo of the grass.
Something for those who wait for the rest
of night to carve its passage and withdraw.
Some grief is slow to make its way in,
slower still to fade. How strange this gift,
this earth we leave the moment that we enter,
this pain so deep it feels no pain, not yet,
this stone that breaks the circle of the sun.
* * *
Most of what we dream is dreamless.
A window on an emptiness, a womb
of stars. Who can tell us otherwise.
Long ago my mother lay quietly dying
beneath the dove of the morning news.
We came together, my sisters, my brother,
me. We were confused like the rooms
of Los Angeles when the power goes,
when streetlamps sink into one black pool.
We slept, if we slept, in shifts, laughed
the odd, cautious laughter of the grieving.
But I recall a distance among us, unlike
all others. Something my mother said,
when I was not listening. And it just kept
calling, small and trembling. Like a star.
Bruce Bond is the author of twenty- eight books of poetry, most recently Invention of the Wilderness (LSU, 2022). His work has appeared widely in journals and anthologies, including seven editions of The Best American Poetry.