In His Studio

Mount Ascutney,
Vermont

 
 In His Studio

Every quick feather asserts a just claim;

it bites like a saw into white pine.

I communicate right; . . .

well, Right has a long and intricate name.

And the saying of it is a lonely thing.

                                                                William Stafford

                                                                Lit Instructor

Even the dust of it seems too much

cleaned away to take a chance

imagining it as a space

where blocks of clay

and shaping tools

scraped away and made

in stage after stage

after stage the greatest

men and women in his mind

at the time.  They played

with his hair sometimes, the way

a river wind might

when he took to looking

toward Ascutney and Vermont or

tools thrown down in a plume

of dirt rising, the very one

I’m missing, walk down

to the Connecticut River

ti throw stone and stone

and stone into the sinew

of the water.  I wonder

if he liked looking

at the way it would open

itself to anything arriving,

the way it pulls it all eventually

down.  (the great winters had to

crack sometime, didn’t they?)

And maybe it was

that coming down to

the water was enough

to plumb the reach of the nostrils

of Shaw’s stallion’s flare, and lip

and severe wild fear

in his eyeballs and with Shaw

so passive (but don’t we

if we’ve known war, know nothing’s

passive, that maybe, if Saint-Gaudens

was today a neuro surgeon

he’d see the deep time

of the brain, how much like clay

the surface seems, until

the probe in where there’s some

natural curve and it yields and comes

to brilliance.  What we see is

what’s left behind and afterwards:

the studio propped with broke

(as though found in a local dig,

a Saint-Gaudens pit

for all his refusals) and drawings

we can’t get close to

and walking in and out

of his studio where some of it was

drawn and erected, where Diana

pulls back her stringless bow

(she’s notched the arrow though

goddess that she is, on nothing

but intention) where busts

of children and women and one

Jesus tucked up in a corner

are what we get when the dust

is enough out of all the window

and its clean.  Though somehow

for me it’s wishing I could see him

touch the stuff, to come away

from the face or the elbow

or the great stallion’s knee rising (and

to think it was mud that Jesus

made, with his own tongue working

enough spit that made the blind

man alive again in his eyes)

and say see, it’s moving, see it really is

moving.  A river of it, and

if I’m brave

enough to reach the river and follow

it too, all the way down,

a bass or a salmon or a trout,

having spawned earlier

in the spring, will be far enough

along to reach the salt of it all

dissolving, but, (lick your lips

because I do when I’m about

to see something remarkable)

thick with the work

of it, of everything now

being mud and grass and milt

and gills and, once seeing this all

and making it pause, a man still, moulding.