In Oklahoma

When you leave a Real City, as Gertrude Stein did, and go to 

Oakland, as she did, you can say, as she did, there is no there, there. 

When you are a Hartford insurance executive, as Wallace Stevens was, 

and you have never been to Oklahoma, as he had not, you can invent 

people to dance there, as he did, and you can name them Bonnie and 

Josie. But a THERE depends on how, in the beginning, the wind 

breathes upon its surface. Shh: amethyst, sapphire. Lead. Crystal 

mirror. See, a cow-pond in Oklahoma. Under willows now, so the 

Osage man fishing there is in the shade. A bobwhite whistles from his 

fencepost, a hundred yards south of the pond. A muskrat-head draws 

a nest of Vs up to the pond’s apex, loses them there in the reeds and 

sedges where a redwing blackbird, with gold and scarlet epaulets 

flashing, perches on the jiggly buttonwood branch. Purple martins 

skim the pond, dip and sip, veer and swoop, check, pounce, crisscross 

each other’s flashing paths. His wife in the Indian Hospital with 

cancer. Children in various unhappiness. White clouds sail slowly 

across the pure blue pond. Turtles poke their heads up, watch the 

Indian man casting, reeling, casting, reeling. A bass strikes, is hooked, 

fights, is reeled in, pulls away again, is drawn back, dragged ashore,

 put on the stringer. In Oklahoma, Wally, here is Josie’s father. 

Something that is going to be nothing, but isn’t. Watch: now he takes 

the bass home, cleans and fries it. Shall I tell you a secret, Gert? 

You have to be there before it’s there. Daddy, would you pass them a plate 

of fish? See friends, it’s not a flyover here. Come down from your 

planes and you’ll understand. Here.

--- Carter Revard (1931- 2022), poet, writer, Rhodes scholarship recipient, English professor at Washington University in St. Louis, medievalist, and member of the Osage nation

The Theory of Prayer

Not in the streets, not in the white streets
Nor in the crowded porticoes
Shall we catch You in our words,
Or lock You in the lenses of our cameras,
You Who escaped the subtle Aristotle,
Blinding us by Your evidence,
Your too clear evidence, Your everywhere.

Not in the groves, not in the flowering green groves
Where the pretty idols dwell
Shall we find the path to Your pavilion
Tented in clouds and fire:—
We are only following the echo
Of our own lyres.

The wise man’s blood
Freezes in every vein and artery
With the blue poison of his own indelible prudence.
And the lover,
Caught in the loop of his own lie
Strangles like a hare:
While the singers are suddenly killed,
Slain by the blades of their own song—
The words that clash like razors in the throat
Severing the tender strings.

For the things that we utter turn and betray us,
Writing the names of our sins on flesh and bone
In lights as hard as diamonds.
And the things we think have sold us to the enemy
Writing the names of our sins on the raw marrow
In lights as sharp as glass.
And our desires,
Uncovering their faces one by one
Are seen to be our murderers!
How did you break your jails, you black assassins?
How did you find us out, you numbered men?

Logic has ruined us,
Theorems have flung their folly at us,
Economy has left us full of swords
And all our blood is gone:
Oh, how like a death, now, is our prayer become!
We lie and wait upon the unknown Savior
Waking and waking in the guarded tomb. . . .

But the armed ocean of peace,
The full-armed ocean is suddenly within us.
Where, where, peace, did you get in?
And the armed ocean of quiet,
The full armed ocean, stands within us:
Where, from what wells, hid in the middle of our essence,
You silences, did you come pouring in?

But all our thoughts lie still, and in this shipwreck
We’ll learn the theory of prayer:
“How many hate their own safe death,
Their cell, their submarine!”
“How many hate Your Cross, Your Key, the only one
To beat that last invincible door
That will surprise us, Peace, with Your invasion
And let us in those soundless fathoms where You dwell.”

-- Thomas Merton (1915-1968) Roman Catholic monastic, priest, poet, and author

Driving in Oklahoma

    

On humming rubber along this white concrete,
lighthearted between the gravities
of source and destination like a man
halfway to the moon
in this bubble of tuneless whistling
at seventy miles an hour from the windvents,
over prairie swells rising
and falling, over the quick offramp
that drops to its underpass and the truck
thundering beneath as I cross
with the country music twanging out my windows,
I’m grooving down this highway feeling
technology is freedom’s other name when
—a meadowlark
comes sailing across my windshield
with breast shining yellow
and five notes pierce
the windroar like a flash
of nectar on mind,
gone as the country music swells up and drops
                         me wheeling down
           my notch of cement-bottomed sky
                        between home and away
and wanting
to move again through country that a bird
has defined wholly with song,
and maybe next time see how

                          he flies so easy, when he sings.

-- Carter Revard (1931-2022), poet, writer, Rhodes scholarship recipient, English professor at Washington University in St. Louis, medievalist, and member of the Osage nation