____________________
Canto LIII (Atomic Braid)
the sun. the
atom. the ancient a b.
abram’s solo solar G-d is
one. one is
hydrogen. is
xenophanes God is one among
gods. not mortal in body not
mortal in thought.
a ring-necked dove. a
father. a ghost.
trinity site in the desert. how
far in single day
can a dead man walk.
knock breathe shine mend
now you seek to. when
will you break
blow burn make me new.
carbon 14 in a cloud.
the clouds then as now
rain down snow.
animal forms in sky.
horse. ox, lion.
if they had hands as humans
have hands they’d draw
worship in the shape of
horses, oxen, lions.
cloud as warship in sky.
cloud as deer
with two heads &
one phosphorescent eye.
one head grazes. one
head gazes. one
finger points at the
sky. a-
tomic clock in
clouds & a
cloud drifts down.
fog that fills the
body. iso-
tope in all iso-
late cells. the half-
life makes a bed
in the brain.
the moon is the
memory of moon.
the sun is.
how be less than
I am is the question
asking itself in-
side me. adam’s
old green work
ethic. the grass
wears away the blade.
grass of which this flesh is
made. mind.
meadow. there is no
single cell inside me
now that was
inside me at my birth.
liver’s lobe and lung’s
leaf. a new heart’s
bundled sheaf of wheat.
my mother memory lives
in a mind
given to me from
inside. what is mine
isn’t my own. life
a strange renewal.
a strange book on loan.
pages blank.
margins full of notes.
blank as the mind of moses
before the stones.
Thou shalt not.
a silence outside a
word threatens
all song. a silence inside
a word from which
all songs emerge.
adam sleeps in a cloud
counting in his sleep.
the ancient 1 2.
aleph wanders the dunes.
rehearsing
the spelling test. the test
site. a trial in the desert.
look up. that bright thing is.
abraham. the bomb.
_______
Chorus
The chorus took turns kicking a rock down the road.
Even the one on crutches played along.
Even the one with a bandage around his head played.
They said nothing between themselves. There was nothing
to say.
The philosopher kept running his hand through the weird river
of the young man’s hair
talking about the soul. It must be eternal. The stars are just
the sheen of bright hair sheared off…
by what asks the boy…by the night. The night is & is not
sharp is something the
chorus said once in a city now forgotten.
City where the hero hooded his head and holding his penis
repeated the word arrows over and over again—
he wasn’t even speaking to himself—
some heard eros & some heard a rose & the cripple
counted on his toes up to seven, the number of his toes,
begging alms from the sun: light fills the empty palm.
When the earth opened a furious light rose out the dark
called the rose-of-no-one’s-beholding
& the blind man limped in saying remember my daughters…
Do you remember? I remember
their goodness was in them as blue is in green.
Let the living bury the living; the dead exhume the dead.
What were the last words the chorus said? The stone
draws a line in the dirt that leads back to the foot that kicked it.
Do you remember…I remember
a snake bit an ankle and the wound sickened all…
an arrow cut a heel…I remember how to heal
a harm by rubbing on the blade that made it a balm
or maybe that isn’t any longer true. Eucalyptus
is good for the wound that is memory. But where is
the knife that made that wound?
A paring-knife, in a kitchen drawer. In the middens
with the vegetable peels and the new-moon-old-moon
of fingernail clippings, lachrymose
bottles of broken perfume, potsherd with homunculus
staring at his fallen self, helmet on but nothing else,
and did you know, you—
a poem assumes that you must be you,
& some poems are found in the middens too—
one used to plug the bunghole of a tun of wine,
a poem about a sparrow, a face as quick as a sparrow…
arrows, arrows…
when the quiver is empty, throw your body at the mark,
is a thought in the middens too—
thought is in the middens too—truth and beauty—
one thought is truth is
a heedful retreat in the face of being, radiance
that returns to oblivion when the shine wears out,
one thought is beauty is
what makes the god go limp he is so overcome by desire…
your face is a blank circle of bronze in the oldest mirrors
a patina that breathes, green and blue,
green and blue. Desire drifts through the night
now as it always did, making the world
into worldliness, a field & the sky above & above
the sky some kind of mind or minor entity—
a shadow, a hole, a surface. What it is is hard to say.
That what is is, & what is not is not, is hard—
a hard path
song opens. Horse that is a song. Or is it the deer
a song is. A chariot. A shoe. No one I know knows.
To create the distance you must learn to cross—
pediment, caryatid, cornerstone, column…
are there other laws
than the law of the muse…
the museum one becomes, an idea in display case,
what does it look like, what does the placard say,
this element you spent your whole life discovering,
the air, but not just the air—
a name spoken in the air.
It looks like an empty box, but love is inside it.
What is a stone worn away by the road?
It’s the absence that was a stone. An anxious mirror
so much more anxious than the sun, that pulsing
arrowhead in the sky waiting
for an ankle to wound. What crawls in the morning,
walks at noon, and limps along all night long?
No one I know knows. The chorus
kicks a rock down the road. It’s just a pebble now.
Draw near. These were the last words the chorus spoke.
______
Homage
—with excerpts from Rilke’s letters
He spent the last six or seven years fastening a coat
button that kept coming undone, took a night class
on the nature of pain & failed the test—
distracted as he was by the cherry-blossom-
flower, contemplated all day long, its way
of being white with green in its heart, a swamp-
meadow green, & the inner world of serene
crystals formed when Orion takes off his belt
& gives it away, a keepsake for the inner-life,
that myth of how-can-it-be-but-it-is, that the pencil
must touch its shadow’s tip before the word can
be written, Orpheus touches Eurydice, angel
touches puppet, but who is who, he doesn’t know
& fails again, a day class on the nature of love,
dunce cap balanced on its tip on his head, crown
open to the sky, conic section gone cosmic, some
apocrypha Euclid cast away to the cult of
the lesser mysteries, a test, a test, everything is
a test, sayeth the gods, in a poem a poet wrote
long ago, or not, on a page thrown out the tower
window, floating down, back & forth, a leaf
on a breezeless day, a feather, you’ve seen
what I’ve seen so you know what I know, how
a poem floats down from a tower.
Can you be
*
so alone
you’re not even with yourself? Marthe, very proudly,
showed me hyacinth bulbs that have begun to sprout
among the covers in the innocent warmth of her poor feet.
The very soul of winter has its blood heat, a bit
of deep sleep in the open, a blissful More
homeless between ourselves and God, you might
call it grace, or a new star in Cassiopeia, or a tendril
lament promising a flower more purple than
blue, maybe it’s blue, maybe it’s purple, a crow
flies through the evening like a winged comma,
but what to pause, but where to breathe, a question
to ask the trees, or one tree, the one tree
paradise built a wall around, that’s the etym-
ology of paradise, to be within the walls. Ask
the sorrow inside the crow, ask the love inside
the dove, what is a wall, what is a tree? It’s a
hyacinth bulb in the warmth of Marthe’s poor feet.
The prayer I want to pray has no God to pray to—
a prayer nonetheless. The moon’s meanwhile. Drawing near
what’s far away, only to let go again, the sea surges up
into the maze of grasses stunning the dune &
retreats into its simplicity, rhyming with eternity, not
quite. Cause & consequence—the old goat
eats the tragic grass grown so long it needs to be
eaten. We simply don’t know what need
destroys in a heart, what it builds. A pinch-pot
a child fills with dirt & weeps on the seed
she planted. Or an urn the ash overfills with
war. High tide. Low. The mother’s slow sigh
reading the report card. The father’s ancient Egypt
hieroglyph behind his eye. A scarab or
an onyx cat’s C+ graded with grammar’s jade eye.
The grade-school bullies gave you a lament
you spent your whole life learning to sing—
the orchard lynx, guarding or inviting, how tell?
Death should be worthy of life. Life worthy.
One would have to, as if in shame, refuse
the music and shy away to sleep
in the stable with the sheep, & there learn to dream
a dream. To wake up with the honey-comb
in your mouth & the worker bees braiding your hair.
Those drones. Humming the song that has no word
but the word now. One would have to
keep sending in thousands of laborers under the burden of the…
now
coat-buttons…
now
grapes.
__________________
Student of the Letter C
Cottonwood leaf in October lit up in the night
by the streetlamp as it falls. Spiral
of the leaf as it falls. Sometimes the context leaves
the letter silent, but if you don’t pronounce it,
somehow you say the word wrong. Hard &
soft, depending on context, like other things.
Cone. Silence. Science. You see what I mean.
The joke’s been funny so long, no one needs
to laugh. The new moon’s gone crescent
and it’s hard to know how to read it. Just one
letter in the sky, Venus bright in the cusp
like a linguist’s footnote saying the source is
unknown, long lost in the Sumerian dust…
long lost in the Subaru’s rust…the Pleiades
looking down on the dog on his leash
sniffing out the rabbit long gone and asleep
in a hole in the ground. “The disciple of scissors
considers the obscene,” is a sentence in the primer
on consciousness the censor thought of
cutting out. All consciousness is
is one word asleep in the mouth. Obscure
cares fascinate. & the letters
asleep in the word, dreaming…crow’s caw
spoke as an aside in an ancient tragedy—
the mind in its parentheses, talking to whom,
no one knows, not even the chorus, not
even the face behind the mask named…
Philoctetes, or Philoktetes, no soft c
in ancient Greek, cupping his hand to his ears,
speak louder, child, speak louder, son—
not my child, not my son. The things one
finds oneself saying to oneself before winter
comes. The shadow of the earth a dark cone
in the darker darkness. Science has some theories
about the moon. A cup that spills the sun’s water.
Old, old thoughts. Still so new there in the silence
of the cottonwood tree, shedding limbs in wind.
The child pronounced the word “chore-us”
& blushed when the teacher corrected him.
He thought Troy was a town in upstate New York
& it was. It is. The chorus muscles into the scene.
The crow cocks her head like she’s a philosopher.
A playwright. A poet. Who am I to disagree—
just a student of the letter C. Just a kid
mouthing the words the hero says, using his bow
as a cane, limping to the edge of the cliff,
saying to himself words time lets us overhear—
what do they want, the gods, those letters,
soft, hard, silent. What do they want—
those rabbits in their holes, dreaming of the moon,
is it new, is it old, listening as they sleep
to the ancient chorus rehearsing one more time
their endless lines, a goat-song or a comedy,
and the newest member, who says I out of sync,
laughs and doesn’t know why, as the hero looks out
at the sea saying, Someday; or is it, Come day;
or is it One day….the empty sun…the full moon…
*
& the boy wakes up once again a grown man…
erection fading in the dawn-light, remembering
rabbits in an amphitheater laughing & weeping
& running so suddenly away, Exit hero with bow;
Enter maid with broom, sweeping the dust from the stage.
The dog wags his tail, chewing a yellow leaf.
When the wind blew it fled as fast as a rabbit
sprinting away from fear itself. What does fear
look like? I couldn’t say. A cloud growing
not larger, but nearer. Or a nameless sense of
could. The old subjunctive, older than the moon,
older than the gods. I wanted to write a short poem
about the letter C—& look where desire got me—
not yet begun. Some scholars argue that the letter
C, in a weird time seldom remembered, was the
first letter of the alphabet. A was a shy god who hid
in the letter B, a house made of fear itself, sleeping
there so warm, as in a colony of rabbits, hiding
from all they feared—collective nouns, beginnings,
poets, a concupiscence of poets, an impertinence of
poets, invoking powers misunderstood. D waits
in the wings, an understudy, wagging his tail, chewing
a cottonwood leaf he’ll shit out later with yesterday
’s news he also ate. Foil wrappers of some candy.
A rock or two. You eat so much you never meant to
put in your mouth. Transcendence. Care.
Conscience. But there it is, in your mouth.
Some see a man weeping. Some see a rabbit sleeping.
When they look up at the moon. Sing
or swallow. As if those differ. As if you have a choice.
______________________________________________________________________________________________
Dan Beachy-Quick is a poet, essayist,
and translator. His most recent book
is Elements & Offerings (LSU, 2026).
He teaches at Colorado State University
where he is a University Distinguished
Teaching Scholar, and for 2026-2027, is
the Trias Writer-in-Residence at
Hobart William Smith Colleges.