Boy Discovered in Suitcase, and: Pastoral, and: Sonnet

Abstract

Boy Discovered in Suitcase, and: Pastoral, and: Sonnet Karl Kirchwey (bio) BOY DISCOVERED IN SUITCASE (luggage scan photograph, The New York Times, May 20, 2015) You say the state was already broken when he fellout of his mother's body into time.You say it was mobile phones and machetes and dust.But here he is, a sonogram, a shadow in a hard case,or 500 dollars for a square meter in a rubber raft,or he slept in a wheel well seven miles high,and you put the dream there, beyond the Pillars of Hercules,that somewhere there is a frontier of slatted steelto comb him from the nightmare of what is happening.He is wrung through every gap in your attention,unsleeping at your sunset gates. The hunched idolof all you took for granted is unlimbering.There are translators who will help him across. [End Page 320] PASTORAL My children have crowned me the great-headed king of the Alps. I adore them, who are slender and alive. I lick their sleeve. They have garlanded my brow with flowers gathered from the June meadow, all that they can hold in one palm: anemone, globeflower, forget-menot, also the night-blue gentian. In homage they bellow like Brown Swiss, while I stand on the one ribbed shield of old snow left in the lee of a mountain that fell long ago, buried a village and made a pristine lake. The marmots whistle from their burrows at my passage up to the sun. I look down at the dark chalet where I lay once in my other body. It has been closed for years: morning glory twines round the shutter. The names of the mountains I knew are leaving me now, Grand Muveran, Petit Muveran, Dents de Morcles, with no more substance than wraiths of cloud that flee [End Page 321] past the wall canted up from an ancient sea, raising its coiled ammonites into the sky. The hollow bronze music of ruminants sounds at this distance like gamelans from a country I will never visit. The lines of white quartz wander in schist lying broken at my feet. I no longer try to understand what is written there: it lies in the retreat of the glacier from its own moraine, the syllable dropped from a word in dialect. My children stand like gilded plants in a valley at dawn. Overhead, the marrow-eating vulture surges, drops and salutes me with a tip of its wing. [End Page 322] SONNET (Acqualoreto, Umbria) 1.The old man says with pride that he spent the morning pickingcherries from his own trees. They overflow the wicker basket at alunch held in his honor, where he moves perfectly at ease. 2.His daughter tells me he is much preoccupied with thoughts ofdeath. 3.Later we are driving a winding road upward to look at a medievaltower bought by some Americans not long ago. There is wildgeranium beside the road, and the fields are dotted with crimsonpoppies. He turns to me and says 4.—There ought to be religion without faith. 5.His mind has a lizard quickness, like the lizard I once saw on asunny wall, its back emerald and its limbs azure, that fell and thenquickly recovered. 6.I feel the drag of language, the gap and delay in my responsewhile a soul waits. I say 7.—Faith makes atrocities, yes. But people cannot live without faith.Without faith, religion is just an intellectual abstraction. 8He looks at me, his face shrewd in the light of yellow broom, andsays [End Page 323] 9.—Are you a believer? The Resurrection was never literal, butrather a promise that, whatever our anguish, Christ can be presentand console us. 10.I do not answer his question. I say 11.—The artists who made the Resurrection literal have given usincomparable solace. 12.And then we have arrived, and the moment closes. He directsmy attention to a plaque commemorating a partisan killed in theSecond World War. 13.The intimacy, the exposure. I do not know where it came from. Or...