In the beginning, there was no number
one, not as the ancients fathomed it.
To be numbered, language needed two
or more, taken as one. A conversation.
At two, we were just beginning to speak
to them, and to the others, this one, that.
Every voice, a little song. I am told,
when I first heard music, I heard no
numbers, then I did. I listened close
to count the footsteps in my fourths, fifths,
the odd sums that could not be broken
and be a music still. They moved me.
The many numbers in any one, the one
rapture in the many, speechless and alone.
Author: Bruce Bond
Bruce Bond is the author of twenty-five books including, most recently, Immanent Distance: Poetry and the Metaphysics of the Near at Hand (U of MI, 2015), Black Anthem (Tampa Review Prize, U of Tampa, 2016), Gold Bee (Helen C. Smith Award, Crab Orchard Award, Southern Illinois University Press, 2016), Sacrum (Four Way Books, 2017), Blackout Starlight: New and Selected Poems 1997-2015 (L.E. Phillabaum Award, LSU, 2017), Rise and Fall of the Lesser Sun Gods (Elixir Book Prize, Elixir Press, 2018), Dear Reader (Free Verse Editions, 2018), and Frankenstein’s Children (Lost Horse). Presently he is a Regents Professor of English at University of North Texas. His most recent books are Words Written Against the Walls of the City (LSU, 2019), Plurality and the Poetics of Self (Palgrave, 2019), and Scar (Etruscan, 2020).
Bronze
from Narcissus in the Underworld: 1-8
Somewhere in the middle of my life,
in the shadow of towers that wall the street,
I turned, and in the traffic and the talk
and clash of horns in contrary motion,
someone called, but what I saw was no one.
Only the multitude, a hundred-some,
and the furious drifts of steam that rose
through grates of iron in the sidewalk.
There I was, confused in the general
havoc. I turned, the way death turns
a mirror to the wall, or a home to some
mausoleum of coats, hats, black umbrellas.
Somewhere in the middle of the night,
my brother called, and I became an orphan.
Skull
Peacock
Geoffrey Hill is dead, and still, now, as I read his words,
his voice keeps crossing over. And a woman at a nearby
table says to her companion, I am so many people these days—
mother, child, whore—I feel exhausted. And as she laughs,
her unlit cigarette keeps making little circles, and the other
woman listens. I want to say, I know the feeling, when I know
I cannot. I want to break through unspoken boundaries.
I cannot write of Nobody, says Hill. No one to narrate this.
The Republic
When the Star-Spangled Banner crackled into fragments
of applause, and cannons thumped the sky with blanks,
the poison in the thermometer sank a little deeper,
but hell, if we would let that keep us from our children,
however lame our backs or vulnerable the offensive line;
the price we pay, knowing a sacrifice for the team spoke
volumes of our ritual need to pretend victory or loss
would matter much or long or express some higher purpose,
a power more sharply felt in the shock that sweeps us
into one hush, one speechlessness where anthems go,
Zion
In a wasteland south of the Great Salt Lake, the man on the cliff edge calls,
his voice lost among the echoes. Each echo stranger than the last, more
removed from the throne and throat of human error. So vast the emptiness
I cannot tell you what is echo, what a voice. One bird becomes two,
two—in silence—one, and still, to me, the many. Where there is design,
there is a story. Where there is beauty, the ache of light that is everywhere
broken. Two birds become one, one the many, a flock against the sheer
Fable
My father’s flashlight led me down a flight
of the trapdoor stairs that shivered on their springs,
and there in the basement, the icebox was our lord,
our great provider, fat, white, streamlined
as a Studebaker or bathosphere, stuffed
with what it takes to survive a nuclear flash,
should it arrive. Here, he said. We will be okay.
Everything will be okay. And I trusted him
because I had no other, and winter was a place
I could not touch. Every white the chalk
that frames the flesh gone missing in the blaze.
Every vision broken and still we dreamt, cold