Fourth Flight of the Imago
What power or intelligence charts the unfathomable
channels and gulfs? What magnet stirs and draws
glaciers over mountains, lava through volcanoes,
waves over rocks and sand, sand through the clepsydra,
and, quicker than the fall of a single grain, wills or
drills through the brain of a merely fallible creature
the intention that guides the hand that pulls the wheel
a fraction this way or that, and so spills out more cruelties,
confusions, calamities, reeling across history, through
individual lives? Are destinies governed by motive?
Or by unpredictable dice-throws, spins on fortune's
roulette? And justice? Is there any? If so, confess
you cannot see or scry the hidden channels it flows
along, runnels it cuts through the palpable, or marks
it erodes on time. You cannot see or scry, let alone trace
patterning in the pattern, or even know if there is one.
Why will this pilot, winning at cards in the mess room,
survive tomorrow's mission, and why does that other
fellow in the corner, intent on his letter home, know
he will be shot down? Why has this team already
lost the day in advance, no matter how finely prepared,
and however experienced and respected their commander,
while that other band of leaderless desperadoes, whose
entire tactical manual consists of a sheaf of scribbles
bundled in a rucksack, their training a tasteless diet
on one obsessive dream, outrageously possess themselves
of all hope's panoplies, and dare to assume the swagger
of outright victors?
Why does this man, who knows the ways
of petals and leaves, grains and stresses of wood, complex
territorial calls and love songs of parlous birds, gas
himself at dawn on a shuttered car's exhaust fumes
in the snowbound front garden outside his own garage?
And what lottery makes of one woman a stony faced
harridan, surly through each of her marriages,
grasping through divorces, despite all previous
generosities of privilege, rank, fortune, beauty's
adornments from birth, even parental love, yet
bequeaths this other, raised in a tenement,
not especially lovely, intelligent or gifted, such
inviolability in the radiance of her passion
that even the crassest and clumsiest of her lovers
is awed, humbled, transformed by the gift she gives –
herself – till he curls, spent and snoring, dreaming
himself a child again, as his frame rises and falls,
like a schooner moored in harbour, while she, wide
awake, smiling, lies cradling his head on her breast?
Whose are the powers that distribute the world's
talents and gifts so unequally: between the corrupt
minister, who by hiring unscrupulous managers,
will always be successful in twisting the law
to monopolise futurity, while the upright
poor citizen, steadfast in outmoded honour,
will die for his scruples rather than ask one favour
let alone tell a lie or commit one rotten deed,
although his whole family be bound to go under?
What hand, against the odds, pulled the Warsavian
musician out of the queue from ghetto to gas chamber,
denied Death his murder, and saved this man to play
for thirty more years of audiences? Why was he chosen?
Why him and not another? And why have fate's
faceless administrators selected that impoverished
aging woman, in her damp shabby apartment
stinking of tobacco smoke, for a stab in the back
from a deranged neighbour, whom she asked in
for tea and a biscuit, because she took pity on him?
How can a life depend on something so trivial?
A biscuit! And can such minuscule details determine
history's shapes? What causes, if any, cause cause?
Originary principles? Chemical switches? Spirals
of predictive genes? Are master keys to structures of
significant action to be picked out of bunched forgettings,
insignificant details, local colours and scenarios,
unnoticed backgrounds? How absurd those intrusions
made by Necessity in the guise of mere appearance
which, if ever recognised, only get disentangled
afterwards, and frequently too late, as fate's quirk
and sleight of hand. Unstitching the threads knitted
by time into time invisibly, isn't hard in the contoured
editings of hindsight, nor is their staining and patterning
with retrospective imperatives. Tess's letter to Angel
should never have gone unread. She did not deserve
that. Desdemona should never have dropped her lacy
handkerchief. If only (enter name) hadn't got up to catch
the earlier train for a meeting that September morning
scheduled at the Twin Towers. Spilt milk, spilt blood.
Yet when armed units from his region's other tribe,
led by masked mercenaries with outlandish accents,
arrived by night in trucks to raid his village, and herded
two hundred and seventeen men and boys into a barn –
what external signal, click of bolt in barrel, dawn
flicker reflected off metal, half-glimpsed between loose
planks in a fence, crunch of boot, somewhere
outside the gate, warning from on high, apparently
unconnected chill running up and down his spine
inexplicably prompted this one prisoner, an easy-going
man, never before noted by his family or workmates
for being remarkably quick, brave or cunning – unlike
his elder brother or better-schooled, richer cousin –
to move to the back and fall flat on his face
before the bullets of the firing squad squirted morning death
through the flesh of his fellow-villagers locked inside there
with him? What voice told him to lie low beneath
warm bleeding corpses of neighbours and companions
and, at the very moment before the assassins barred
the double doors for the last time, and threw in
straw and petrol to torch the whole building, what
irresistible command impelled him to squeeze out
of the small back window and roll away in a ditch? And
what strength, welling from what irrepressible source,
drove him to spend seven nights tottering half-crazed
through intricate forests and over pathless mountains,
eventually to recognise – and name and accuse – his
kinsfolk's killers? Why this man? Why not any other?
Why this beautiful athlete and that dwarf or cripple?
Why this one in a wheelchair from birth and that one
deaf, dumb, blind? Why such uneven distribution
of nature's wealths and gifts? What help is
there in knowing that, under this sun of unreason,
minutiae weave and twist unpredictable patterns
and mindless impersonal factors leave
indelible fingerprints? 'That's just the way things
are', smiled the rainbow in his head to the terrified
torture victim. 'You can die now, if you like,' whispered
the fallen gas mask to the conscript abandoned
in No-Man's Land, hands numb with cold, 'because
you can't reach me, can you?' 'I know it's absurd and
unfair, but I'll murder you just the same,' shrugged
the vast, wind-battered, unlistening savannah
to the farmer with no water, milkless mother,
starving helpless child, orphan riddled with AIDS.
Weren't we all children once? And aren't all
children innocent? What plan, graph or grid
plots such hidden contours, fissures, meridians,
poles and equators of hopes and expectations,
blunt zeroes of time's beginnings, and infinitudes
of space-ends? Is there no constant, to be
grasped, clasped, clung to? Or even glimpsed
or grazed in a moment's fractal shimmerings?
The detached Goddess Ananke pours acid on our eyes
and smiles the far-away smile of a lover, thug
or torturer. Is it life itself that's cruel, since we must
all die anyway, or just human stupidity rips us
in shreds and kills off the innocent, and makes
questions like these imponderable, except in the flashes
that, without announcement and for no apparent reason,
beg, even order us, to get out of time, as if we were
fluff on wind? I wish I could hold the moment and be
held by it, just as my blue butterfly captured my hand
and just as that photograph borrowed a moment's light
to catch its imprint for always, allowing the creature
itself, wholly unharmed, to go about its business free.
( from The Blue Butterfly )
Copyright © Richard Burns,
2006.
Richard Burns lives in Cambridge.
His most recent publications are The Blue
Butterfly, Selected Writings 2 (Salt Publishing, 2006), For
the Living: Selected Writings 1. Longer Poems 1965-2000, (Salt Publishing, 2004) and
In a Time of Drought (Shoestring Press, Nottingham, 2006).
