Chris Gropp

Chris Gropp Poems

The Best Poem Of Chris Gropp

Once And Again

Once, high in the mountains, I lived with you,
for years, quiet in a cabin, watching the sun and moon
chase each other and never meet
but through the long silence of the emptiness,
receiving and giving light. We watched the bones of trees
harvesting the green in tiny, sticky buds in Spring;
full grown and shimmering like children's glitter in summer,
grown old and wrinkled - too crisp to hold aloft
against the Autumn winds; we watched the skies
change, the earth change... we watched the streams
burst and bubble, always changing, seeming to lie still.
We watched, and we were all those things.

Once, out in the forest, we wandered the tiny trails
that deer carve out on tip-toes
from stream to thickets,
and through the endless flowing, grassy mead downs;
we lived in a hobbit-hole, dug in a mountain side,
our village of callus-footed sneakers hiding
in the brush. eating flowers and calling for the birds
to come play in the sun with us.

Once we skated 'round the pond
precariously moving on a surface underneath it all,
rolling on the ice melted by a razor's edge
taking tiny slices out of time for us.
Once we walked gloveless hand in hand, warmed against the winter
by a little tasty apple. Once we dreamed it would never end.

It never did, and it always was.
In the timeless eternity, once I was all things:
I was you; you were I; and again will be.
Today I am moving with the energy stored in oats:
but once in the endless times,
I subsisted on the meat stripped from bones of my brothers:
once and again, I contained a nameless cruelty.
You see, there is no certainty: but somehow,
the spaceless and timeless single-point-dimension
inside me, inside you, inside the bumble bee,
the hummingbird, the clumsy bear,
the gliding vulture and the flower,
in the hexagonal crystal, and the muddy muck of blood
after birth, in the crow and the scarecrow,
in the ox and his yoke and the fortune-teller and her rhymes,
in the shaded reaper at harvest-time, and the scythe,
inside all those spaces and times,
there is nothing:
willing and able to contain it all,
to fix it with no limits, to let it grow boundless
as the visions that come in the little death each night.

Once I contained the love to suffer years of torture,
the painful cost of being free
and being in accordance with the fullest way of being:
hanging on a crucifix; consumed by a conflagration of hatred
for violence, eaten by the fire that eats all earth, all water, all air,
turning all into nothing.
Once and again, you hung there and burned there too.
Once and again, you turned to building perfect structures in space,
triangles upon triangles: once you reigned atop one; once
you were pinned under a giant earthen cube of it.
Once I sat on softest grasses under the tree
and contested my self for supremacy:
once I simply waited,
watching the wheel turning so slowly... so quickly,
with no loves, no lusts, no fears -
only the invisible eye.
Sometime in the future, as it was in the past,
I tasted gunpowder in my salty tears,
holding in my trembling strong hands
the deep red love, the moist and soft organs that hid under heavy metal armor
of the only brother who ever counted me as one.
Once I felt the rage and terror of the need to kill what I eat.
Once I looked out through softest eyes
as my organs were mined out of my soft body
and fed into the glowing and joyful eyes of your children.

I take in my oats: a temporary house for the sunlight.
Not much: little is needed to animate this earth
for one who is willing
to crawl through the tiny spaces between endings
and beginnings with mostly the breath to live on.
I bring my mind around to the stillness of cycles -
how the wheel moves without traversing any space...
how it spins and leaves so much to cover... to be uncovered.

But once, I ate the flesh off the bones of history,
I ate as much as could, until my fire was squelched
in my belly by the weight of too much earth.
Once, and again, you ate the whole world too,
and slept and slept and slept - a dragon's slumber on a massive treasure.

***

ONLY in imagining, and without the certain proof of experience,
can a fleeting glimpse of time's endlessness,
and the soul's constant motion, through this body... or that...
through ever-turning and ever-still cycles,
be caught: a glimpse that disappears, almost, it seems,
before it is seen. For there is no knowing, no words really,
for billions of years, and incalculable distances,
held within the vastness of a consciousness.

How could you contain a picture of the world
in the mind's eye: that seeing, not with the eye,
but underneath and within the eye, has no space:
yet contains the fleeting glimpse
of timelessness. Sometimes the grounds burst forth
and waters rush, recalling long-hidden secrets
that had always been in the openness:
the wind beating through the still-tall trees;
the Sun upon its Zenith, crumbling rocks;
the Moon wide open to us, revealing all her glory,
bleeding until bone-dry whiteness;
the Stars hardly move... but even they are moving,
ever so slowly with a still-quiet magic.
Once and again, endlessly, you recognized your death,
as she lit the unknown
like bones dried to salts by the Sun's ceaseless giving.
Giving. Giving. Who could contain a love
that makes death out of life and life out of death?

Once, far away, you dreamt of your own endlessness -
so did I, when I felt everything through your skin:
you dreamt the white bones of the clouds would carry
you through death; you dreamt the deep, moist blackness
of earth would be a safe home: you dreamt a dream of green solace,
the balance of yellow-white lust, and the black and blue fugitive -
escaping into a tree: not quite ready to dangle from the limbs,
still lusting
for a taste of the breeze.

One could wish for the ceaseless still motion of balance:
the swishing of the trees or the meadow grasses;
the bright pimples of Indian Paintbrush, Columbines,
and the plentiful yellow mountain buds on earth's skin;
the rise and fall of the clouds through the mountain afternoons
like ocean's waves, like waves of breath, in some times cold and crisp
as lightning, in some times warm and soft like sweaty hugs.
Life's cravings for life
are boundless, compelled to great labors...
and bound to end....
If only
for the possibility to be born.
Once, and far off again, you and I were all these things,
and being all, were nothing.

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