Ikon

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IKON
poems by JAMIE PARSLEY

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PO Box 10115
Fargo, ND 58106

Reading Robinson Jeffers’
“See the Human Figure”
on a Cold Night in June

He was dying then
of loneliness I suppose, or
old age. It is a sad and lonely

end, one suited to him. It was
not a surprise, I’m sure. It came
to him as something familiar.

It is this dying self I imagine
still lingers, up from the rocks, from
the yew tree where his ashes are—

that fine gray chaos of bone and cinder
held tight in the hard-packed earth
with Una’s and the baby’s.

I lie back. What is it about these
words, these old-man images, that
obsess me so? What do they have

to do with me? Except that I know
what it is to be walled in on all sides
by poems and rain, by something

nameless and formless, yet so real
one can taste it. The candles give off
a thick yellow.

I blink at the words on my lap. The wind
at the roof hisses and his lonely presence—
filling the room like a scent—flees. It goes

off to the shore, to the yew that creaks
and groans but never breaks in the gale.
In this house—its warm heart

sighing loudly over the rain—
I am alone and so sick with poetry
I could almost die.

Rainbow

after Max Jacob

It is the hour of the night
that makes the mountains
cry out in pain and the rocks
groan beneath sure-footed animals.

The birds have all flown off
from here as though they were
poisoned, flying to the shore, for
that better horizon.

He stares at the ocean as though
he is dying and will never see it
again. He gazes for a long
time at the place the water,
meeting the land, makes
a powder of mist.

When he thinks he
can’t stand the pain any longer,
you, with fire roaring behind
you, appear on the rocks below,
climbing toward him with your
cross slung across your bleeding back.

When he stretches out his arms
toward you, everything vanishes—
the night, the sea, the screaming birds,
the animals roaming in the dark.

He follows you wherever it is you’re going
because he is, suddenly and
unexplainably, happy.