Poem Therapy at 11:12 P.M.: November 13, 2010 - Melissa Kwasny

Reading Novalis in Montana
Melissa Kwasny

The dirt road is frozen. I hear the geese first in my lungs.
Faint hieroglyphic against the gray sky.


Then, the brutal intervention of sound.
All that we experience is a message, he wrote.

I would like to know what it means
if first one bird swims the channel

across the classic V, the line flutters, and the formation dissolves.
In the end, the modernists must have meant,

it is the human world we are weary of,
our arms heavy with love, its ancient failings.

But that was before the world wars, in 1800,
when a young German poet could pick at the truth

and collect the fragments in an encyclopedia of knowledge.
There is a V, then an L, each letter

forming so slowly that the next appears before it is complete.
The true philosophical act is the slaying of one's self,

Novalis wrote, and died, like Keats, before he was thirty.
They have left me behind like one of their lost,

scratching at the gravel in the fields. Where are they
once the sky has enveloped them?

I stand in the narrow cut of a frozen road leading into mountains,
the morning newspaper gripped under my arm.

But to give up on things precludes everything.
I am not-I, Novalis wrote. I am you.

If, as the gnostics say, the world was a mistake
created by an evil demiurge, and I am trapped

in my body, abandoned by a god whom I long for as one of my own,
why not follow the tundra geese into their storm?

Why stay while my great sails flap the ice
as if my voice were needed to call them back

in the spring, as if I were the lost dwelling place for the flocks?

I like the title of this poem, and the pairing of a poet against a western state known for cowboys and its endless blue sky. I suppose each of us could pen similar titles. Of late, mine would be Reading Plato in Utah, or Deciphering Tolle in a Small, Small Town.

Like the poem's speaker, I too look to the geese and know that they beckon me to join them. Earthbound, I call to them to make of me their home. And if I can't have god of the gnostics, orany god, then the wild geese have permission to settle in my heart. Until they do, I will make do with them landing in the fields behind my home.