Dean Rader
The Fire That Consumes All Before It
Cy Twombly’s Fifty Days at Iliam (1978)
Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift (by exchange) of Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White, 1989, 1989-90-1, © Cy Twombly Foundation
I. Burns
along the blue—
burns
on the skin—
the sky a sea of swimming arrows:
explosions of shield and shade:
shuddering along the edges of everything:
below the men in the ships,
the sky a spume of sparks,
everything a light:
Listen to the tree
flame.
Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift (by exchange) of Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White, 1989, 1989-90-2, © Cy Twombly Foundation
II.
Listen to the tree flame
into the sound
that is your own prayer,
your soft whisperings into the void—
Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift (by exchange) of Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White, 1989, 1989-90-3, © Cy Twombly Foundation
III.
Into the void
of white weapons,
branches of bone
and cartilage,
into the night in which everything lights—
even history’s black trunk.
Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift (by exchange) of Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White, 1989, 1989-90-4, © Cy Twombly Foundation
IV.
Even
history’s black trunk
(if you can):
the spear in your hand
won’t do it neither will the bow
beneath your skin.
Time is never an arrow
except those moments
when it is.
Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift (by exchange) of Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White, 1989, 1989-90-5, © Cy Twombly Foundation
V.
When it is
in a poem,
the moon is a bone of pure music
& the heavens a bruise & the stars tiny torches.
Or maybe the stars are the dead—
a distant flame firing deep into themselves,
the night sky
nothing more than
the blackened wings of angels.
Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift (by exchange) of Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White, 1989, 1989-90-6, © Cy Twombly Foundation
VI.
The blackened wings of angels,
quiet as the moment before god speaks
that silence the reversal of speech,
the inhalation of all that is not sung—
the other side of sound.
Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift (by exchange) of Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White, 1989, 1989-90-7, © Cy Twombly Foundation
VII.
The other side of sound:
where we
& language
return once more.
Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift (by exchange) of Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White, 1989, 1989-90-8, © Cy Twombly Foundation
VIII.
Return once more
to the ship of your own making,
making your way into
the way—
shield after shield after shield.
What hasn’t been broken?
Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift (by exchange) of Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White, 1989, 1989-90-9, © Cy Twombly Foundation
IX.
What hasn’t been broken
may yet one day be:
Not just Troy but the idea of Troy:
the idea of an idea:
a body within a body:
a sword within our skin:
shadow of eternal night:
history lives only as long as we write about it,
but vengeance—
that first fire—
is never extinguished.
Look:
it still burns.
Courtesy Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift (by exchange) of Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White, 1989, 1989-90-10, © Cy Twombly Foundation
X.
It still
burns—
Dean Rader has written, edited, or co-edited eleven books, including Works & Days (Truman State University Press), which won the 2010 T. S. Eliot Prize, Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence, edited with Brian Clements & Alexandra Teague (Beacon) and Self-Portrait as Wikipedia Entry (Copper Canyon), a finalist for the Oklahoma Book Award and the Northern California Book Award. He is a professor at the University of San Francisco and the recipient of a 2019 Guggenheim Fellowship in Poetry.