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My Barefoot Rank
David Craig
My Barefoot Rank
Copyright © 2017 David Craig. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.
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199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3
Eugene, OR 97401
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paperback isbn: 978-1-5326-3316-4
hardcover isbn: 978-1-5326-3318-8
ebook isbn: 978-1-5326-3317-1
Manufactured in the U.S.A.
“Francis was so small
it was almost like you could hold him
in your hand; all of them—they seemed
to act out their own stories, playing themselves:
feeding the hungry, covering the sick.
But for whose benefit, that’s
what I want to know? And who
were the grown ups here anyway?
How were we supposed to take this?
And the crèche, wasn’t that the same deal:
life imitating itself? And that little church
he built, so small it could’ve been stuffed
with dolls or keepsakes? What kind
of lives were these, and why
were these guys so darned accessible?
Were we supposed to shrink down,
fit inside smaller doors; are we supposed
to become some fraction of ourselves?
Would that leave more room for others
in the world? Would we all then come
closer to the part of us that’s real?
Is the absurdity of this drama
supposed to make us laugh at ourselves,
recognize ourselves—again. And how
would that experience sustain itself?
In memory perhaps, one we can’t escape?”
We are cars on golden blocks
future flowers—a field we haven’t come to.
Days there are always what they are:
blue; the sun, colored chalk on the sidewalk.
We’ll be finished—but won’t be, not really.
There will be so much to fill us in on,
so much of the new; everything but the next day,
dandelion spores discoursing expansively
on the fundamentals of the universe.
There will be smiles from someone you
might have known. Socrates will fill you in,
his life at fifteen—in other words, things will be
just as they are now—only you will hear
what words mean: each loaded, like Keats’s fruit;
that ceiling, still as it was in 1821—but transformed.
You’ll be able to sit better Steps.
Apples will offer hardier apples,
his chamber music opening as it always has,
into something else—the cross,
which makes everything clear.
Fall is here before the leaves know it
but the foliage has no time for abstractions,
absorbing heat, sequestering, conspiring,
each vestige twisting in the wind.
They scrape against every new name
as they descend, trying to understand
what is happening in the world.
Water is their game, their long epitaph.
Stars are their residence.
Stolid, these trees are libraries, books—
as are the snails, the chained dog next door,
yapping in protest.
They all bow, stand against us, housing
our temporal lives.
This is why we push. This is why we define
ourselves and take their spaces for our own.
This is why we rage through our seven-year skins—
because we don’t live here forever, want to.
Each person struggles in a battle he can’t win,
sets himself against his planted grass, cuts it
every other Saturday, our angst against what is.
It’s a thin hand
that reaches up into the air—
a daughter’s, a great grace
that makes its turn above the soil:
just a hand, no rings, no polished nails.
