Illustration © Helen Nicholson
The Riddle
The mystery of making things
From words is how the needed element
Seems like a metal jot that springs
To a magnetic hand—a sacrament
Or symbol, grace
Of earthly place
That answers to a need: that lends, that brings.
As Aengus, wanderer, is drawn
To a far lake and finds along the shore
A girl in the guise of a swan,
A radiance of form he’d chased before
As flying gleam
Within a dream,
But now their fairy story meets its dawn.
As when my mother wept for curls,
For the little coffin like an iced cake
—The child arrayed in silks and pearls—
When all her mother-woe was flooding ache,
Then came this word:
Then flew a bird
To nestle by the one who could not wake.
These are the wonders of the word
That wants to gather like a bud to make
A floating bloom, or chirp and churr
A morning or a mourning song for sake
Of woman’s grief
Or man’s relief,
For bliss and rue: yoke-mated, blended, blurred.
The Horse Angel
Heaven and earth are like two hands that touch,
Clapping together when a thunderbolt
Rives the air and melts the sand to glass.
I traveled weeks to see a famous horse,
A snow-white thing born from Medusa’s blood:
The beast with wings, joiner of earth and sky.
At our beginning, unseen fingers split
The heavens from the earth, and ever since
We’ve loved the rising smoke, the falling star.
And so I longed to glimpse this Pegasus,
Cleaver of soil and rock, maker of springs
Where the singing muses like to gather.
Tarsus in Cilicia was the region
Where, looking up, I raced with hand outstretched
To catch a feather tumbling from the clouds.
My forty days of travel snared no more,
For Pegasus was now a horse of stars,
His bright-winged shape a bonfire in the night.
And yet the feather was a joy to me,
A graceful message from the earth and sky
That said two hands still separate and join.
Marly Youmans
Marly Youmans is the award-winning author of fifteen books of poetry and fiction. Her latest collection of poetry is The Book of the Red King, a sequence centered around the figures of a transforming Fool, the Red King, and Precious Wentletrap (Montreal: Phoenicia Publishing, 2019.) Her just-out novel is Charis in the World of Wonders, a book of adventure and romance in a time of war and witch-panic in the Massachusetts Bay Colony (San Francisco: Ignatius Press.) Other recent books include Thaliad, The Throne of Psyche, Maze of Blood, Glimmerglass, and A Death at the White Camellia Orphanage.
The stanza form of The Riddle is borrowed from George Herbert.
This is a response to Serendipity & Synchronicity, our first Spiritus Mundi theme.