03-17-2020
​
Cyrus Cassells
​
THE SHADOW
after Hans Christian Anderson
​
Traveler, I came to a colossus
of clustered houses—a sultry kingdom,
replete with breeze-swept balconies,
belled donkeys, and vying boys
slyly triggering Roman candles —
all of it beneath a glittering
caravansary of detectable stars—
In the bullying heat
of that equatorial city,
my rambunctious shadow grew
thinner, desiccated, restless,
and leaped, abracadabra
(more jack-in-the-box
than agile gazelle!),
onto my mysterious neighbor’s
intricate balcony.
When my rogue-swift, dark counterpart
returned, I asked:
What did you see? Who lives there?
Poetry, he revealed.
Yes, Poetry, as numinous and longed-for
as the Northern Lights,
often lives in palm-guarded places,
as a shuttered Garbo, an elusive
recluse cloistered among us—
Imagine: I was a seeker tantalized
by light and shadow
that I faithfully mimicked
in expressive oils and aquarelles,
an ardent, itinerant painter, attuned
to the way garden shadows
become diligent brushstrokes
or late afternoon lace.
So why should I be surprised
at my headstrong shadow?
After his first enlightening escapades
in Poetry’s captivating rooms,
in one magnanimous gesture,
I set free my shadow to emerge
as his own up-and-coming man,
to acquire blue serge, a boutonniere,
a dapper bowler—
But he employed his newfound humanity,
his effusive charm and flair
to persuade the winsome princess,
my beloved fiancée,
that I was the unruly imposter, the mad
shadow who deserved oblivion:
first bedlam, then the chilly
volley of a firing squad—
And in the flash point I was manacled, I saw
our fierce mirroring was never
friendship, twin-ship,
but a crafty fisherman’s net,
a supplanting spider’s stratagem—I saw
how slowly and inexorably I became
a Christ in distress,
and my rebellious shadow
a charioteer, a ruffian god,
a key-cold executioner.
VII. Communion
A revering pitcher of milk
poured on a slave’s
cool resting place
(even a ghost
needs sustenance, Augutus),
an artful Sea Island slave
christened Jupiter
who festooned his banjo
with crude, blue,
cantering horses,
a blinded slave who lived to savor
unbossed days.
My chains fell away:
that dream.
My chains fell away
with a Juneteenth glory.
*
In the midst of bondage,
ingenuity,
a deepdown plenty;
in the midst of plenty,
a glorious, saving
self-forgetfulness:
time spent with the bold-horsed,
at-the-ready banjo
seemed heaven time—
replenishing, redeeming,
warming him
as thoroughly as hoe-cakes
and the homeplace blue
of supper fires.
Likewise, in Carolina, a whole
dog day morning could be occupied
with the brusque wedding
of a disheveled wheelbarrow
and the windblown apples
from my grandfather’s hardy trees.
*
Ghostyhead,
move-along man,
what is this night cousin to,
this Low Country night?
The onerous passage:
the well-deep dark of the hold,
the not-gutted baritone
crying and singing—
eoho, eoho—
of the man chained next to you—
as if God’s Eden-intact fruit
were eternally out of reach,
as if solace and dayclean,
have mercy, were impossible:
dark of the hold
thick as blackstrap syrup.
*
Nevertheless, dayclean comes,
enlivening, bold as a posse,
with its buffer
of buttered cornbread,
of bracing coffee cooled
just-so in a china saucer,
and hurried back to the cup
(my grandfather Frank’s habit)—
Sustenance:
a shrimp-and-grits pipe dream,
then the real plate, oh my,
the real communion.
*
As if we could be fed,
washed clean, and crowned
with bride-soft shore birds
(that dream),
all of our deeply stored wishes
waterborne, Augustus,
all of our derided people’s
countless night terrors
hushed at last—whip-scars,
tears, and chimeras
of the slave-holding past
dissolved in dayclean’s
cleansing power, its pennant-clear
promise of resurrection.
*
On days of upending hunger,
breakspirit days,
able wrought-iron makers, able watermen
defer their dreams—
Heart, make room
for the blinded Gullah ghosts,
for the breadline men, make room
for the windfall apples.
​
from the sequence The Gospel According to Wild Indigo
​
​
ELEGY WITH A GOLD CRADLE
Now that you’re forever
ministering wind and turquoise, ashes
eclipsed by the sea’s thrust
and the farthest tor
(I know you were always
more than my mother)—
giveaway flecks tipped and scattered
from an island palisade;
now that you’re a restless synonym
for the whistling fisherman’s
surfacing mesh,
the alluring moon’s path and progress
through a vast chaos
of unrelenting waves,
let me reveal:
in the at-a-loss days
following your scattering,
in my panoramic hotel, I found
a sun-flooded cradle—
so pristine, so spot-lit and sacramental
beside my harbor-facing bed,
I couldn’t bear to rock
or even touch it, Mother:
I marveled at the gold-leafed bars
and contours—the indomitable,
antique wood beneath, an emblem
of unbeatable hope
and prevailing tenderness—
then, for a crest-like, hallowing hour,
listen, my mourning was suffused
with the specter of your lake-calm
cascade of hair, inkwell-dark
in the accruing shadows,
your rescuing, soothing contralto,
and oh yes, Isabel,
the longed-for fluttering
of my nap-time lids:
entrancing gold
of the first revealing dawns,
the first indispensable lullabies—
​
-from The Gospel According to Wild Indigo, Southern Illinois University Press (Feb 22, 2018)
​
Cyrus Cassells is the author of The Mud Actor, winner of the 1981 National Poetry Series Competition; Soul Make a Path through Shouting, nominee for the Pulitzer Prize and winner of the William Carlos Williams Award; Beautiful Signor, winner of the Lambda Literary Award; and The Crossed-Out Swastika, finalist for the Balcones Prize for Best Poetry Book of 2012. He teaches at Texas State University in San Marcos.
