Jorie Graham - Just Before

At some point in the day, as such, there was a pool.  Of

stillness.  One bent
to brush one's hair, and, lifting

again, there it was, the

opening—one glanced away from a mirror, and there, before
one's glance reached the

street, it was, dilation and breath—a name called out

in another's yard—a breeze from

where—the log collapsing inward of a sudden into its

hearth—it burning further, feathery—you hear it but you
don't

look up—yet there it

bloomed—an un-

learning—all byway no birthpain—dew—sand falling onto sand—a
threat

from which you shall have

no reprieve—then the

reprieve—Some felt it was freedom, or a split-second of
unearthliness—but no, it was far from un-

earthly, it was full of

earth, at first casually full, for some millennia, then

despertately full—of earth—of copper mines and thick
under-leaf-vein sucking in of

light, and isinglass, and dusty heat—wood-rings

bloating their tree-cells with more

life—and grass and weed and tree intermingling in the

undersoil—& the

earth's whole body round

filled with

uninterrupted continents of

burrowing—&earthwide miles of

tunnelling by the

mole, bark bettle, snail, spider, worm—& ants making
their cross-

nationstate cloths of

soil, & planetwide the

chewing of insect upon leaf—fish-mouth on krill,

the spinning of

coral, sponge, cocoon—this is what entered the pool of
stopped thought—a chain suspended in

the air of which

one link

for just an instant

turned to thought, then time, then heavy time, then

suddenly

air—a link of air!—& there was no standing army
anywhere,

& the sleeping bodies in the doorways in all

the cities of

what was then just

planet earth

were lifted up out of their sleeping

bags, & they walked

away, & the sensation of empire blew off the link

like pollen—just like that—off it went—into thin air—&
the athletes running their

games in Delphi entered the zone in the

long oval of the arena where you run in

shadow, where the killer crowd becomes

one sizzling hiss, where,

coming round that curve the slowness

happens, & it all goes

inaudible, & the fatigue the urgent sprint the lust

makes the you

fantastically alone, & the bees thrum the hillsides,
& all the blood that has been

wasted—all of it—gathers into deep coherent veins in the

earth

and calls itself

history—& we make it make

sense—

& we are asked to call it

good.

Authenticated by the reach of its perceptions and its sense of obligation, the self appears magnified, even aggrandised, in the poet's repeated reaching towards an indifferent but beloved infinity amid which humans oppress and slaughter each other. The suspicion grows that the important thing may somehow be not the thing seen or understood, but the fact that the self has seen it: the intended scale of things is in effect reversed. That this seems quite guileless makes it more worrying, though not unfamiliar.
There are precedents for Graham's work in the way America adapted Romanticism – in Whitman, for example – and in traditions of Protestant testimony.