‘A Quiet Conscience Sleeps in Thunder’

—old English sayingBefore we stopped making war without stopin our bedclothes, minds erupting intothe inexplicable slop of creation,the constant caustic calluses aboveour brows seemed intaglios, indicatingsome dreams of a much larger, longer life.“It was the first bite,” I said, “we’ve kept upfor the sake of the short end of the stick.”Then, for long moments, we lay exhaustedin bed, heads full of injustices, struckby the good a god could do, or the goodwe could do without shame every night.By dawn, all the old questions remainingunresolved, foreboding bodies fallingtoward us as far as eyes could see, formingtheir own casual gliding from their god,“He holds our hearts half-aloft,” they complainedto no one, “and He never lets us sleep.”Purified beings, uselessly beautiful,with their wings’ intense spiritual music,these creatures went out of their way to say,“It isn’t how you do something, but whoyou do it to. When your body catches fire,there’s no sense in feeling you’re the flames…” *Hardened by experience, then we kneweach voice as something sent to advise usabout our own fallen qualifications,as, blue-lit, sidling in, their speech bearingdeeper strains of despair, we rememberedour own old gifts for feeling so exposed.Since we didn’t care to carry out suchmeasures of what those voices came to swear,there seemed no consolation in our learningto sell our souls: the eyes for which we fellwould fall for other eyes– becoming stillcolder because of what we’d done before.That was one truth, as we made our paths throughlabyrinths, bearing the messages thatwe’d tried, side by side, for some small miracle–especially since we’d learned sharper waysof seeing to the ends of our days, pinningeverything, yet nothing really, down.Formed to our own ways of thinking, we feltunready yet to choose anything more:the walls around us had never been breached,the soft plush flesh cushions we’d grown into,unlike marble, weren’t chaste to the touch;we’d never even been past those poor shores. *There would be other journeys, to confrontthose whose dreams of our dreams of dreams come truecame true only in collapsed oppositions,so cold that our neighborhood froze like deadbrotherhoods after joy– whose ends confirmedresistance to time, as if for the last time…Then, adding new pictures on paper toour collections, it’s how we’d take refugein teachings in accordance with new rulesof making old rules obsolete. One by one,these bright flowers had less and less to dowith our extinctions, so it was usefulto have something else to study: leaves, soil,stamps in glassine envelopes, those okaybouquets; to use the big muscle groups insideour bodies; then, to fall from the edge ofwords into wonder, perhaps to composea paean that might, someday, feel just right.For now, we’ll travel on, discoveringplaces and things we’d thought we didn’t needto know, viewing others through dark glasses,seeing everything swimming before usas formulated, as a test as great asour forever unrequited love of selves.____David Schloss was born in Brooklyn, NY, in 1944, and attended Columbia, U.S.C. Cinema School, Brooklyn College and The Iowa Writers Workshop (MFA, 1967). He has been a Professor of English, first at Cincinnati, then Miami, Ohio.His books and chapbooks include: The Beloved (Ashland, 1973); Legends (Windmill, 1976); Sex Lives of the Poor and Obscure (Carnegie Mellon, 2001; Greatest Hits (Pudding House, 2004); and Group Portrait From Hell (Carnegie Mellon, 2006).