The Dark Side Of The Watershed. {prose poetry}
{source}
I forget, then comes a day when through the mind’s gloom a light penetrates, a thrust of clarity from beyond banked thunder-clouds. Sensitive beyond reason to touch and word, days of contrition and sullen repentance, this dogged northerner under his louring sky of rain and fall.
Who is this that I am now witness to? Where does he arise from, where does he reside? Where does he go when he is not filling my skies with dark disquiet, breathing his chill mist over love’s purest mirror? Busy with questions, what is this pain, he asks, why do you go through with it? There is no cavalry trumpet at dawn, no serenade of angels — over and over, the tolling questions repeated, endless…
Visualize, she says, the child that will come to us. Every day. I thank her as the light of her vision breaks through an ancestral habit of tight-lipped endurance. Our embrace on that high cliff, upon the very edge of the world, a prayer to the budding of life within, and all around.
Uton we hycgan hwær we ham agen, ond þonne geþencan hu we þider cumen…
We are standing on a bald jut of sandstone high above the valley. At the valley’s head the King Mountain enthroned in purple haze, father to us all, lofty and distant; yet we are as supplicants at his feet, close enough to touch, so close, it seems, that all that lies between us, the silver-ribbon river, the indistinct woods, the countless anonymous lives, are as nothing.
Tufts and flakes of cloud like the careless scuffs of an etcher upon an aquamarine surface of wax, revealing the shock of bronze beneath. A moment’s movement caught and held beyond time and space: such pure stillness, such godly perfection. It is sunset, and close to where we sit a dilapidated cottage of stone, the stuff of mountains, faces North, the dark side of the watershed.
Distant is the line of mountains in the blank gaze of its empty windows, a south-facing wall of snow and light where the peaks rise up beyond Verona. A collapsed portico is all that now remains of someone’s latest attempt to love that desolate place, and a rotting trellis fence of chestnut poles tumbling over the edge into the forest wilderness below. I remember the last time there was life there, an eating place for people who would frequent the woods. But never did I see the owners, and the clients were men in flak jackets and bandannas prowling through the trees, shooting arrows at cardboard cutout animals nailed to the trees, snipers in make-believe and fancy-dress, re-enacting the acts of a war that is never far below the surface.
There is a rock by that house, an elderly neighbor once told me, look closely, you will find a hole chiseled into its surface. The partisans had a gun emplacement there during the War, and they swept German convoys on the road below. You can’t see the road for trees nowadays, but back then it was a clear shot, he remembers.
Fit now only for the furtive trystings of fox and deer, porcupine and boar — who knows, perhaps the wolf has also returned to these hills — I look at the house’s closed, dim features, its unlovely squareness, and feel love for the hands that made it. I would do it up, I tell myself, make it light again, turn it into my writer’s eyrie from which to survey the dark plains of memory. There is still much work to be done there, the bleached bones of long-forgotten wars still to be buried before I, too, can rest.
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Robert Norris has always written as a pilgrim writes: on the knee, in a battered notebook, with a stub of a pencil (or a favorite pen), for no purpose other than to be present at the moment something breaks through the dross, curious to see where the spider-hand will crawl to next. The pilgrim has now understood that there is more to life than private experience, that maybe there is something afoot in the world, and we are all called to stand and be heard; that working in the twilight of one’s inner workshop, only to lock the door at the end of the day and return to the ‘other life’, is no longer an option. The themes that inspire him are memory, perception and the creative act. You can find more on Robert on his website.
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