Colonial Manuscript

(Found in a safety deposit box)

by David Berman

Orbit One—Far above my life, one trillion storeys up, above the silver judgement wheels, is a clear civilization, along the sidereal coast, a perpetual glide, where the rapid hearts sleep, where armrest factories puff, “we invite the nervous,” for warm firm handshakes immemorial.

Orbit Two—On the table is a glass of red soda, a traffic ticket, and a sketch of a telephone. Out the screen door I can hear two men arguing about a shed. The screen makes the whole tableau into a grid. I’m surprised when a cardinal lands on the window sill. I’ve only seen them on placemats.

Orbit Three—It was a revelation on a sled that brought him in from the cold white hills. To ask his wife, if in a city in the afterlife, she would recognize him on the street.

Imagination, memory in drag, called up a picture of an endless plane covered in sidewalks.

Orbit Four-In the painting, sky and ground run parallel. There is a palm tree and a jet. A forest stands in the corner, a set of antlers lies in the grass.

Off to the left there is a river, but you can’t see it, it’s outside the frame. The river is full of old wheels and chain, but they don’t make it go.

Off in the distance, it’s very faint, there’s a hill. A man sold everything he owned to buy that hill. The agent said he would be able to see the future from up there, and that it would be the same future every time.

Orbit Five—Several thousand years ago there was a man who wanted to kill a very powerful man. In his own room he drew his sword and stuck it into the wall to find out whether his hand could carry through. By some chance the powerful man was standing on the other side of the wall and was thus slain.

And that is how I live out every one of my days.

Excerpted from Retrospect by Æ

That being from a distant country who took possession of the house began to speak in a language difficult to translate. I was tormented by limitations of understanding. Somewhere about me I knew there were comrades who were speaking to me, but I could not know what they said. As I walked in the evening down the lanes scented by the honeysuckle my senses were expectant of some unveiling about to take place, I felt that beings were looking in upon me out of the true home of man. They seemed to be saying to each other of us, ‘Soon they will awaken; soon they will come to us again’, and for a moment I almost seemed to mix with their eternity. The tinted air glowed before me with intelligible significance like a face, a voice. The visible world became like a tapestry blown and stirred by winds behind it. If it would but raise for an instant I knew I would be in Paradise. Every form on that tapestry appeared to be the work of gods. Every flower was a word, a thought. The grass was speech; the trees were speech; the waters were speech; the winds were speech. They were the Army of the Voice marching on to conquest and dominion over the spirit; and I listened with my whole being, and then these apparitions would fade away and I would be the mean and miserable boy once more. So might one have felt who had been servant of the prophet, and had seen him go up in the fiery chariot, and the world had no more light or certitude in it with that passing.

Of Mere Being by Wallace Stevens

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

“For the stream of civilisation winds and turns upon itself, and what seems the bright onward current of one age may in the next spin round in a whirling eddy, or spread into a dull and pestilential swamp.”

Some excerpts from Earth Keeper: Reflections on the American Land by N. Scott Momaday:

“We humans must revere the earth, for it is our well-being. Always the earth grants us what we need. If we treat the earth with kindness, it will treat us kindly. If we give our belief to the earth, it will believe in us. There is no better blessing than to be believed in. There are those who believe that the earth is dead. They are deceived. The earth is alive, and it is possessed of spirit. Consider the holy tree. It can be allowed to thirst. It can be cut down. Worst of all, it can be denied our faith in it, our belief. But if we speak to it, if we pray, it will thrive.

…

I stand where Dragonfly stood and prayed; Daw-kee, give light and life to your people. Give us one more day, and one more, and at last one more. I lift my old arms in bold entreaty. There the house and arbor are falling into ruin. Those who have inherited the homestead have not cared for it. Inside the arbor, once a place of happy activity and joyful talk and laughter, I place my bare feet on the red earthen floor and breathe the summer-scented breezes that enter there, I bless this place which is sacred to me, and I ponder the omen of the dead white owl that I found in the gutted house. Even in death the snowy creature is a keeper of the earth.

…

When the great herds of buffalo drifted like a vast tide of rainwater over the green plains, it was a wonderful thing to see. But there came a day when the land was strewn with the flayed and rotting remains of those innumerable animals, slain for sport or for nothing but their hides. The Kiowas grieved and went hungry, and it was the human spirit that hungered most. It was a time of profound shame, and the worst thing of all was that the killers knew no shame. They moved on, careless, having left a deep wound on the earth. We were ashamed, but the earth does not want shame. It wants love.

…

When I was a boy my father took me to a place where relatives once lived. Nothing was left of the house but traces of a foundation. The place was far out on the plain, so far that mountains were in sight. My father, when he was a boy, visited the people there. At night, he said, we could hear the howls of prairie wolves. They are gone now. I would like to have seen them. Your grandfather told me that they were handsome, with long legs and beautiful yellow eyes, wild and searching. I try to see the wolves in my mind’s eye, but I can only imagine them. I wish I could describe them to you. My father’s voice had trailed off. Will I tell my grandchildren, I wonder, of animals they will never see?

…

On one side of time there are herds of buffalo and antelope. Redbud trees and chokecherries splash color on the plain. The waters are clear, and there is a glitter on the early morning grass. You breathe in the fresh fragrances of rain and wind on which are borne silence and serenity. It is good to be alive in this world. But on the immediate side there is the exhaust of countless machines, toxic and unavoidable. The planet is warming, and the northern ice is melting. Fires and floods wreak irresistible havoc. The forests are diminished and waste piles upon us. Thousands of species have been destroyed. Our own is at imminent risk. The earth and its inhabitants are in crisis, and at the center it is a moral crisis. Man stands to repudiate his humanity.

…

Those who deny the spirit of the earth, who do not see that the earth is alive and sacred, who poison the earth and inflict wounds upon it have no shame and are without the basic virtues of humanity. And they bring ridicule upon themselves.

I am ashamed before the earth
I am ashamed before the heavens
I am ashamed before the dawn
I am ashamed before the evening light
I am ashamed before the sky
I am ashamed before the sun

This pronouncement from the Navajo has increasing relevance in our time. Daw-kee, let me not be ashamed before the earth.”