Lance Mannion: By a friend and colleague who has left us, two poems

LANDSCAPE WITH ASCETIC

The road's in ruin. Vultures
hover, moles,
forsaking the earth,
perish beside smoking trees.
Your boat's nearly lost in the distance!
It's moved past the chafed mountains,
it believes in the sea,
in the palette-wide lights of the sky,
a vessel of clenched teeth
sailing on a vale of tears, alone.
Your parents' tombstones
list in a yellow wind.

You could have been craftier,
like that spellbound deer
camouflaging herself in thin air.
But what use half-measures?
Fragile with what you needed to know,
still earthbound,
you turn your back on what's left,
denying yourself even the solace
of God's light,
though it shines from behind
gilding your hair
as you walk
out of the frame of the known world.

INITIATION

Didn't I mean to make
simple songs?
I was content enough,
safe as the face held
in hands that love it,
a faith healer's touch,
truth enough for more lives
than I could survive. But

you walked me through ditches,
taught me opaque
languages, naked in plein-air
made me kiss every mouth I met.
Love death too, you said,
and I studied the winds
turning myself
against the natural current. Now

the morning opens
with a pack of voices, lands
flat on its face, a dealt
deck. Just today, let me stay home
in the veil of a single word
like a nun
and not hear how the tug of life
has noosed another one.