Pillar of Cloud

The sacred is frightening to the astral body,
As is its absence.
(Charles Wright, “All Landscape is Abstract, and Tends to Repeat Itself,” Appalachia)

This is what happens to the man when the pillar of cloud appears.
This is what happens when the pillar of cloud sculpts his torso
with all ten thousand fingers of language
while through the lens
of Gothic science it reads palms, the counterpoint in them as if
for a moment it had allowed the man to be Bach, to read
along the figured notes, the complications in the weave.

Like Bach, the pillar of cloud lights the living room from within
with a snowy face crowned with nightingales.
It webs aside the fretwork,
the thick wires twist into braided lanyards, the thin ones stretch
long and hollow as a pipe organ. Nights are cold now
and the planets bay at the moon and it
turns him inside out
as if to reveal his own stitching, it lifts a match as if to ignite something

in his chest. Look, it says to the man, you get to be the man who unturns
stone from stone, the story cracking from your own
broken mouth,
that cracking and a great flutter of hands and the impossibility of it,
the orchard’s ripened pear taken by the last fox, gently,
as if tonight
might be assembled from shards of pottery,
as if tonight the apparition
of cloud has no ticket, no luggage, nothing to read,                no place to sleep.

Jeffrey Levine is the author of three books of poetry: Rumor of Cortez, nominated for a 2006 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry; Mortal, Everlasting, which won the 2002 Transcontinental Poetry Award; and most recently, At the Kinnegad Home for the Bewildered (Salmon Poetry, 2019). Levine’s many poetry prizes include the Larry Levis Prize from The Missouri Review, the James Hearst Poetry Prize from North American Review, the Mississippi Review Poetry Prize, the Ekphrasis Poetry Prize (twice), and the American Literary Review Poetry Award. In addition, he is principal translator of Canto General, Pablo Neruda’s epic work of poetry. A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Levine is the founder, artistic director, and publisher of Tupelo Press, an award-winning independent literary press located in the historic Berkshire Mountains of Western Massachusetts, and he also serves as director of the esteemed Tupelo Press Writing Conferences.