Nevada
Nevada
Two Poems written for the 0 Project by award winning poet Shaun T. Griffin.
Shaun T. Griffin is the co-founder and director of Community Chest, a non-profit organization serving children and families in northwestern Nevada. He is the author of four books of poetry (most recently, Woodsmoke, Wind, and the Peregrine, Black Rock Press, 2008), a book of translations (poetry), and the editor of three volumes of Nevada poetry and prose. He received the Governor’s Arts Award in 1996, and the Rosemary McMillan Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Arts from Sierra Arts Foundation in 2006. For two decades he has led a poetry workshop at Northern Nevada Correctional Center. He is currently editing a volume of articles on the late poet and critic, Hayden Carruth.
Out of the black sky
came the faces of men
or women, mouths
opened like halos
for the words inside
a name or sorrow—
each separate zero
a phantom
chalice for grief
floating in the ordinary night
of labor and family,
this house of our flesh
made flesh in a mural
to celebrate the art
of human kind—
and it was not enough
to restore the vagrant
owl in each of us:
this confusion of eyes
could do no more
to protest their insignificance—
like the artist whose hand
tore down the mask
of anonymity
to seed any possible
redemption, now
that we have gone
to a shroud of human light
when all other quiet
has rent the light from us.
Into the silence we sing, no breath
but our own to reverberate
in the moist indifference:
ageless, unchained nightingales,
we have no origin but sound and then
the drumbeat on the horizon:
whose eye will drop for this food,
whose blood feed the hatchet at water’s edge,
and the rowing boat returns to gather
its slaves from shore. Now my hand must choose
to deliver the cold canary to its stable.
All our lips purse this airy indifference
to dress the night in perfect, remorseless
birdsong. Not a bird of wings, but the bird
who will never fly, save to the arms
of the beautiful stranger for whom we call out.
This is our awakening, our strident
speech to silence: the vast circumference
of a mouth answers with a pitch
we recognize. Those who sing otherwise
cannot know its exotic pleasure, but we do:
a mouth is a cave of wilderness and joy,
and therein we swallow nations
who can do no more than lie on tongues.