eileen tabios

four Cantos from
TRANCE ASCENT

Canto 10
Hewing to the crooked path
binds wings to earth

where the Fall
repeats deliberately

until wings become
another burden to bear.

And you suddenly become a statue in the midst of a crowded street, a horde of black-clad strangers dividing itself about you (making you remember, even as you continue to fall into this dream, a photograph of nuns lifting their skirts as they run towards the edge of a wave). What makes you pause, forgetting those waiting for you by the front desk of a gallery, waiting for you to tell them what they shall see today?

Canto 11
Ah, Agobbio! Let this poem
be writ not for fame

but for prayer.

Somewhere, a teacher ends a class by lowering herself on a mat. Before a crowd of acolytes, she bends forward and over her crossed legs, her right hand clasping her left wrist behind her back. She forms the yogic seal in gratitude to all as everything is existence. She forms the mudra as she offers, “Bless yourself, bless all beings, bless yourself again.” Behind closed eyes, she sees a white light. After wiping her tears away, you will bury your face in her hair and smell a rose immortalized at the peak of blooming. After bathing in warm, white light, she opens her eyes to rise.

Canto 15
Walk to where you cannot
shade your eyes

and you walk past
the ledge of the cliff.

Dazzled, you raise
sudden wings—

to receive an answer
is to ask a new question.

Before you rose from a black leather chair to fall in line you had been reading about Life and a House in Southern Tuscany. You were learning a fabric existed named “Solace” and how it was available in celery, parchment, black pearl, creme brulee, persimmon, and blue sage. You know with “utmost confidence” she would love the vocabulary of fabrics: how “reds were tomato or claret, greens were khaki or caca d’oie (quite literally ‘goose shit,’ and resembling tarnished copper), oranges were brick, terra cotta, or cinnamon.”

Canto 19
That falcons at rest
stare only at their feet

does not preclude their leaps—
wings no less than fully stretched

when they hear, they hear
the meat of their “wished-for call.”

You understand all of this for you are a man with a steel spine. But you have learned enough so that you are moved to whisper as you look down over a city of skyscrapers piercing the clouds, “In England there are glazed chintzes with sprays of rose, peony, hydrangea and gladiola whose names evoke the life of country houses: Bowood, Amberley, Sissinghurst, Sutherland. There are linens called Lamorna or Serge Antique which come not in white and gray but toast and oyster. There is a tapestry fabric called Marly, from whose complex greenery small red berries occasionally burst. In London there is a room from where I shall always read and write you. My Love, oh my dear Love, you never imagined my longing, my missing you.”

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