Tag: metaphysical poetry

Uncut

Before the word, the light stood whole—
no edge to catch it, no angle
to prove it was there at all.

Then the word came, a shadow
thrown backward across the light,
trying to give an edge to what
threw no shadow of its own.

This is the failure built into naming:
the stone is cut so it can shine,
and cutting is a kind of loss—
a wound the light forgives
by entering it anyway.

So the word is not the thing.
It is the facet, not the fire.

Hold it still and it goes dark;
turn it, and for one breath
it remembers what it came from.

That breath is the poem.
Not the gem. The glimmer.

The Icon

Gold ground. White horse.
The lance always descending,
the dragon always caught —
not slain, not winning,
that suspension my daily bread,
the point perpetually
at the point of.

I returned to it as to a chapel,
the dragons within
held by that stasis,
by what the icon
promised and kept.

Then —
the gold ground shifting,
the lance no longer
quite descending,
the dragon lifting —
St. George,
for the first time,
imperiled.

The always
became
was.

I am undone.

The Dervish and the Wave

Swirling waves, dervish-like in their intent,
divining direction beneath the moon,
the water neither wandering nor sent
but turning, as all turning things must turn
toward some still point the motion can’t explain —
the eye of every gyre a kind of prayer,
where salt forgets itself, freed of its name,
becomes the simple fact of moving: here,
and here, and here. The moon gives no reply.
She keeps her cold and distant office, draws
the deep in rhythms older than the sky
and older still than any naming laws.
So let the dervish and the wave agree:
to spin is not to search — it is to be.

Caught

The brevity of life catches one short of breath.
We thought there was time to inhale once more, only to discover a final exhalation.
Was it a dream, a hallucination, or merely the meeting of the circle?
Stars. Dust. Return.

Genesis: The Creation of Adam

He formed him
from the ground—
clay still wet,
clinging.

He bent close.
spent breath passed—
spittle,
the damp of earth
at the mouth.

And the man lived:
warm,
hungry,
leaking already
what he would lose.

This was not corruption.
This was the gift.