TOWERS - in Search of

in Search of   

— for Katherine Kavanaugh, 2009

We seek a form, a shape — adequate enough: the kitchen table, mother’s leg — the thing
to hoist ourselves. Barely arrived, we already aim for the sun.

Piling our maple blocks, we are makers from the start. A log laid across the stream,
the bark boat with its leaf sail, a ladder to a platform in the pines. Something

makes us want to cross, to climb. Something we are born with invents a larger lens, metal wings,
rockets. We scheme.

Our plans — torn and pasted — made, remade. The secret covered, uncovered and covered again.
Higher, ever higher. To be grazed by the hawk’s wing; fed,

like Elijah, by the ravens’ horny beaks. A vigil, and whatever we might surmise about blue-black space,
the limits of what we see.

What is wished for? To be tree-like, god-close? Outside of time? We are preoccupied with prominence.
The point, through whatever haze or light,

always farthest from “what is.” It’s not enough to see the sun and stars, but to be one of them. Or
beyond, the furthest place. Something in us knows

there’s something we must find. If only we could find the form, build the thing. What kind of wood? How
many steps? Where to tie the ropes? Spindly or spired?

And the other ones, those we make with hope or the nails of loss and grief…   the thing through which,
with which, we might arrive above our flesh and blood,

above the moss, outside of air. Would it be benevolent? Malign?   A place we don’t need eyes to see.
Unfixed, unlike the towers we make to get us there.

A place to startle us. As in love’s moment. Would we let down our guard? Forget who or what we seek?
We would arrive at the deepest eye, the one

that would let itself be entered, be taken in and taken. What would we, then, what could we, name the
seeker? The carrier of thought and all its structures?

What is known—at last: a certain rust and beetle-bitten ruin, the sure reunion with the roots of all we’ve
ever feared or dreamed.