Temple Cone

2008, 2010 Creekwalker Poetry Prize Finalist

Temple Cone is the author of two books of poetry, The Broken Meadow, which received the 2010 Old Seventy Creek Poetry Book Series Prize, and No Loneliness, which received the 2009 FutureCycle Press Poetry Book Prize, as well as of six poetry chapbooks. Awards for his work include two Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Prizes, the Christian Publishers Poetry Prize, a Maryland State Arts Council (MSAC) Individual Artist Award in Poetry, and the John Lehman Award in Poetry from the Wisconsin Academy Review.  

An associate professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy, he lives in Annapolis with his wife and daughter.

e: [email protected]

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SPEAK AND BE DONE

We say the hawk rides the wind, but isn’t the wind carried, too?
When veering close to granite cliffs, which one fends off death:
Wings thin as shadow or the air lifting that strange angel?

Robinson Jeffers sits atop Hawk Tower in the raw morning
To stand watch over the day’s creation: thunder in darkness
As the ocean booms, then light and a thousand worn cliffs.

He savors the godlike savagery of carving form from nothing.
The Milky Way eddies out, river-vast and ribbon-thin,
The stars eternal as stones, meaning they too shall be worn away.

In the cadence of the surf are the cries of man and animal alike.
Gray whales migrate through the ocean’s endless emptiness,
Sounding their own elegies in the cathedrals of their bowed skulls.

He would like some shard of happiness for his granddaughter,
But he is an old man, not a fool, and knows the decided ends
Were made before time by winds deaf to any petition.

He loves the hawk cruising steep cliffs, for it needs no pity.
He loves the waves, for they cause no doubt.  The prophet shall burn
In the candescence of his words, and need only speak and be done.




THE BLESSED UHT

The mind at morning is a mist still clinging to the ground.
It awaits the evaporating light and faintly hums with change.
But the slender knotgrass won’t relinquish its hold, not this hour.

Imperceptibly, the moist air changes, until perception begins.
Poplar leaves bat in a breeze, robins plunge to the grass,
And the fox remains colorless under maidenhair ferns.

Uht, the Anglo-Saxons called it.  Not dawn, but the moment before
The light finds its proper object, before fogs have scattered,
When Grendel lopes back to the fens after his midnight hunt.

This is what the light says: when you become a father, your own
Father can protect you no longer.  You become the shield for your child,
The broad plate that protects the warrior by making itself vulnerable.

Back out of all memory is the feeling of someone carrying you,
A fingerprint on the contour map of the soul that marks even orphans,
Who recall the mother’s oceanic tides, the father’s roar and calm.

Back to the mind.  The light gives way to what the light reveals.
Cold moss, a whippoorwill on a branch, mist tangled in trees.
This is what the light says: you must forsake yourself in order to bless.




SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT THE SOUL

What does the soul weigh?  Does it differ from person to person?
Does the kingfisher, rattling over the river, possess one?
What of the staghorn beetle?  The Douglas fir?  The Himalayas?

If I looked through the deepest microscope, could I find the oak
Coiled within the acorn?  Could I find my own death within me?
Would it be fine-grained, like sharkskin, or jagged as the Himalayas?

From what are we saving daylight?  Are there telephones in the grave?
Did Nijinsky remember his dances as a phantom limb feels ghost pain,
Or as a snow leopard considers the valleys far below the Himalayas?

Tell me, what fills the sleep of whales?  Do they dream of their lost feet?
Of the empty air as they breach skyward and crash in fountains?
Do they look at us as we look at clouds scattered above the Himalayas?

Why is there no vocative case for god in Greek?  If god is not a noun,
Is it a verb whose tenses we have not yet learned to master?
Is her skin godding the sunset?  Do cranes god over the Himalayas?  

Since Keats always began or ended his great odes with questions,
Should we assume he only found answers in the midst of life?
What does the soul weigh?  As much as a flower?  Or the Himalayas?


Originally published in Chronogram




A PSALM BEFORE HEALING

A bowl of noodles with oil and sesame on a drizzly night,
A mug of scalding coffee, a braid of chala from the neighbor,
These small services uphold the firmament of stars, selah.

Never forget that the dove grieves but won’t share her story.
The hunters never understand.  When she bolts skyward,
She is the skiff the exile rows through morning rain, selah.

How lissom the homerun swing of the left-handed catcher,
As if his bat had caught a comet’s arc and made it shine.
He shall never read this poem or know his own grace, selah.

With its notched legs, the Jerusalem cricket can’t help but sing.
The Alps can’t help but storm.  The corn can’t help but grow.
The world is a second language we can’t help but speak, selah.

Once healed, the blind must be taught the ways of vision.
Diamonds in a green cloud are sunlight showing through leaves.
They learn, but dream of seeing in the dark once more, selah.

Just when you think you’re coming to the end of these poems,
Of your life, of a bowl of noodles, there’s an unexpected sweetness,
A last trace of oil you can sop with a handful of bread, selah.


Originally published in 32Poems




A RABBLE OF BUTTERFLIES

The Greek psi, first letter of psyche, the word for breath,
Resembles both a windblown iris and a butterfly drinking nectar
Through its uncurled proboscis before the light wind bears it away.

In his favorite photograph, Whitman sits with a butterfly on his finger.
Yet those dark, iridescent wings were cardboard, Whitman’s own cutout,
For the soul, he knew, was made from bright scissors and an old man’s hands.

Lorca dreamed Whitman’s beard woven with ribbons of butterflies.
They eddied among his whiskers, dappling Manhattan streets,
Clothing and uncovering the thighs of men and women with rainbow silks.

Should we be surprised that Nabokov’s blues are almost patternless?
They radiate the cloudless cold of April, though their underwings
Are studded with silver, the tucked-away blossoms of Solomon’s seal.

Perhaps we might honor the mayfly, too.  After two years underwater,
Subimagos molt and rise so quickly they leave their mouths behind.
No song, save onionskin wings humming desire, desire, desire.

There is no end to the rabble of poets who write about butterflies.
After the long chill, they taste spring leaves, become chrysalises,
Finally unfurl into the flight that sketches rosettes upon the air.


Originally published in Virginia Quarterly Review


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