Relay Octets
By John Peck
*
If sound, then why not the full reach of mind,
and if that cantilever then why not the whole
keyboard with its totality of partials?
But then one meets the dragon, pipes up a bright
disciple, whose two dramas, lieber Meister,
are suicide and the founding of the state.
My name is a household word, writes the hid teacher
to his ambitious aspirant, in my own household.
*
Three, three, and two, the comeliest proportions
in twice four, carols a bobolink at midtree,
the golden sections of sight flap nostalgic for sound.
But of touch there is no ratio, there are only
gradient, ascent, compression, easing,
and space evacuated, not yearning; filled.
Therefore, Belovèd, middle is neither midmost
nor at the squeezed core, but where breath resumes.
*
A man who had killed in order to save life,
and had left his clan to guide the foreigner,
never went home. Or, home was what he came to.
The girl who knew that something before and after,
of which no one spoke, was always brimming now,
came to his corner, knitted, did not speak.
What had striven in him and was seeding in her
gazed out over the harbor, through white sails crossing.
Copyright Credit: “Relay Octets” by John Peck from M and Other Poems. © 1996 by John Peck. Published by TriQuarterly/Northwestern University Press. All rights reserved.
Source: M and other poems (TriQuarterly Books, 1996)