Tag: metaphysical poetry

The Inversion Cycle: Eight Scrolls of Withheld Grace

The Counterpoint of Ponder, O Morpheus, the Night Sky

Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice, also called The Wreck of Hope Oil on canvas paint, 96.7 cm × 126.9 cm (1823–1824).
Caspar David Friedrich, The Sea of Ice, also called The Wreck of Hope
Oil on canvas, 96.7 cm × 126.9 cm (1823–1824).

On the Unmaking of Benediction

This cycle of verses—The Inversion Cycle—emerged not as a contradiction, but as a counterweight to The Blessing of Morpheus: The Sending Forth, a series of benedictions articulated in reverent tones and metaphysical gestures within the poem Ponder, O Morpheus, the Night Sky. That earlier work was rooted in the soul’s deep yearning toward the ineffable, culminating in luminous affirmations bestowed by the dream-god Morpheus upon the seeker. In time, those benedictions came to feel too complete, too resolved. I began to wonder: what if they failed?

The Inversion Cycle is not blasphemy, but a form of apophatic honesty. It does not seek to erase Ponder, but to stand beside it—its negative counterpoint. Each scroll of the cycle corresponds to a specific line or blessing from Ponder and performs an act of unmaking: where Morpheus blesses, these verses refrain; where he sends the seeker into mystery, these verses stall at the threshold; where he assures, they withhold.

To honor that reversal, a further restraint was imposed: the exclusion of the very vocabulary upon which the original work (and many of my other recent works) so often relied. Words such as breath, dust, light, shadow, silence, and memory—among others—have been set aside. Their absence is not a loss but a signal. These are not the tools we are permitted to carry here.

The scrolls appear here in the same order as the benedictions from Ponder, O Morpheus, the Night Sky. This reversal respects the original arc—from the loosening of dreams to the transformation of the soul—and follows its negative path with precision.

What remains is austerity, not despair. These unsacraments do not offer consolation, but they do speak. If Ponder was a song of ascent, then this is the long exhale after the music ends—a psalter of withheld grace, composed in the space where blessing does not descend.

Let this work be read not in defiance of belief, but in the trembling of its undoing. For if it is brave to bless, it is perhaps braver still to stand in the space where blessing will not come—and write there, in the dust, what remains.

Scroll I: Of the Clinging Husk

Let not your dreams fall—
for they will not fall.
They remain,
clinging like husks unpicked,
blackened not by season,
but by refusal.

You will try to cast them down,
but they are fastened,
not to limb,
but to marrow.

They do not curl like leaves.
They do not return to soil.
They sour upon you,
a bitterness in the sinew,
a ferment in the thought.

And if you turn to shake them loose,
they will tighten.
Their threads are not of sleep,
but of habit,
knotted in long forgetting.

There is no wind to lift them.
No frost to loosen them.
No gardener comes.

Remain, then, beneath their burden—
bent,
unshed,
unchanged.

Scroll II: Of the Inscribed Weight

Take them.
You will take them.
You cannot help it.

The names carved into stone,
the words burned into walls,
the cries etched into earth—
they cling not to your pack,
but to your ribs.

You bear them not as titles,
but as scars.

They whisper through your marrow,
resisting every act of unmaking.
You try to enter the place without form,
but they speak before you.
They call the ground by its old name,
and the gate does not open.

Even the sky does not answer
when it hears them rising again.

These names were not carved to remember.
They were carved to bind.

And now,
as you stand at the edge
of the place where all naming ends,
they press their syllables
against your tongue,
and you speak them,
not in defiance,
but because you cannot forget.

Scroll III: Of Implements Abandoned

Bring not the weighted balances,
nor the woven snares of longing.
They do not hold,
not here.

Their handles crack in the frost
where no stars rise to bless the hour.
Their mesh is brittle—threaded not of wool,
but of claims left too long in the mouth.

The mind, honed to edge,
cuts only fog in this place.
The heart, cupped too gently,
spills what it never held.

There are no laurels in this soil,
only reeds that do not bend
and brambles that do not bleed.

And should you cast such tools before you,
expecting fruit, or fire, or favor—
they will return to you as ash,
unsought, unshaped,
the chaff of means
mistaken for ends.

Scroll IV: Of the Withheld Offering

Bring not your hollowed chest,
stripped clean of ornaments and plea.
It will not be filled.

Wonder has no purchase here.
Its gaze returns unreflected
from stone too smooth to be shaped.

Let the mind remain loud and unyielding,
for awe would shatter in this poise
like frost-cracked bronze.

As for your feet—
do not lift them.
There is no basin here,
only ground dry from the beginning,
lined with rings that do not ripple.

The wind does not attend.
It does not lift.
It does not listen.

There is no path across this floor,
only grit,
and the marks of those who came
thinking they would walk upon revelation.

Scroll V: Of the False Horizon

Do not seek.
There is no one to be found.

The sea does not receive you.
It is not fluid,
but glare stretched to the edge of motion—
shimmering not with promise,
but with mirage.

You did not launch.
You drifted.
And your craft was not chosen,
but assigned,
drawn from timbers
meant for no voyage.

The sky above you swells with stars,
but none are true.
Each one marks a path
that bends inward,
circling you back to your forgetting.

You will think you move.
You will call it seeking.
You will call it bold.
But you are already known
by the thing that does not answer.
And it has left no threshold,
only wind
that cannot be charted
and depth that does not hold.

Scroll VI: Of the Barren Threshold

There is no beyond.
Only the gray field where sleep forgets its end
and waking does not begin.

Here, nothing waits.
Not voice, not veil,
not even the last gasp of wonder.

What lies past dream is not fullness,
but poise robbed of sanctity—
the deafness of stones
before their naming.

No stars ever hung above this place.
No fire traced its vault.
Only pallor,
dull as bone in a dry shrine,
untouched by flame or veil.

And death,
so often imagined a gate,
has no depth here.
It is shallow, crusted,
and holds nothing but its own refusal.

Let no one say this place is holy.
It is not what remains made full—
but vacancy made permanent.

A place unmourned.
Uncalled.
Unmade.

Scroll VII: Of the Unbecome

Go not.
There is nowhere that calls.
No road unfurls before you,
no veil parts,
no watchful eye lingers on your vanishing.

The question you bore
was not accepted.
It curled back into you,
like a tongue that feared its own utterance.

You will not be shaped by asking,
nor known by your seeking.
You will remain
as you were before the yearning—
a vessel without fracture,
never poured,
never filled.

No sound will rise behind you.
No trace will stir where your feet passed.
Even the soil will forget your weight.

Be still, not in peace,
but in the form that does not unfold.
Remain—not as the question—
but as that which never found its shape.

Scroll VIII: The Soul Beneath the Blanched Sky

The soul, girded and unmoved,
stood beneath a sky without veil—
a dome blanched of fire,
where nothing had ever gleamed,
only ash adrift from unremembered pyres.

It bore no garment.
No mark of calling or descent.
It was as parchment without script,
unhandled, unblemished, unread.

No winds stirred the plain.
Only cairns rose in rows,
not raised in reverence,
but born of the land’s refusal to yield.

The trees there had no buds.
Their limbs were stiff, as if carved for stillness—
a forest of halted prayers.
And beneath them,
the roots did not seek nourishment,
but curled inward,
content in their forgetting.

There was no calm,
no sacred pause.
Instead, a muttering of syllables
rose from the dry hollows—
sounds without grammar,
without bond,
giving rise to no names,
no intelligible form.

And when the soul pressed its palm
to the ground,
there was no spring,
no pulse,
only crusted clay—
neither moist nor cracked,
a firmness that would not give.

It asked nothing.
Not from pride,
but from knowing
that some places are beyond summons—
places where even longing
has been turned to stone.

Where the Furies Pause

by Donald S. Yarab

In myth, the Furies pursue the guilty. In this meditative poem, they do not chase or condemn, but pause—witnesses to memory, silence, and the uncertain balance between reckoning and reprieve. Beneath the yew, they wait—not gone, not appeased, but listening.

Vincent van Gogh, Trunk of an Old Yew Tree (1888) Oil on canvas, 91 × 71 cm London, Helly Nahmad Gallery
Vincent van Gogh, Trunk of an Old Yew Tree (1888)
Oil on canvas, 91 × 71 cm
London, Helly Nahmad Gallery

“Necdum illum aut trunca lustrauerat obuia taxo / Eumenis…”
— Statius, Thebaid VIII. 9–10

“Nor yet had the Fury met him, bearing the lustral yew…”
— Statius, Thebaid VIII. 9–10 (adapted translation)

As darkness descends and light abates,
The Furies wake at the turning of fates.
No horn is blown, no omen flies—
Only the hush where judgment lies.

They come not crowned, but cloaked in ash,
With broken names and eyes that flash.
Not wrath alone, but what endures—
The weight of memory that never cures.

They walk where silence used to sleep,
Where secrets rot and letters bleed.
The breath of dusk is cold and tight—
A wound reopens in the night.

By yews they pause, where death takes root,
In soil grown thick with ash and fruit.
The bark is split with silent cries,
The rings record what speech denies.

They do not speak, but still the trees
Murmur of trespass in the breeze.
The wind forgets its mournful tone—
As if the world waits to atone.

A shadow stirs, but does not fall;
A light withdraws, but leaves a call.
No hand is raised, no doom is cast—
And yet the pulse runs through the past.

The air is thick with what might be:
A breaking, or a turning key.
The Furies halt—but do not sleep.
And from the yews, the silence… deep.

So still they stand beneath the yew—
The Furies veiled in dusk’s soft hue.
Its needles dark, its berries red,
It shelters both the quick and dead.

They neither strike nor turn away,
But hold the hush at break of day.
Their eyes are dark, their purpose blurred—
As if they wait to hear a word.

Betwixt Dawn and Dusk: A Meditation on Life and Dream

Preface

The first lines of this poem came to me in the night—those strange hours when thought and dream pass like shadows through the mind. I awoke briefly, not fully, and the phrase lingered: between and betwixt dawn and dusk… and the inverse, between and betwixt dusk and dawn. I held onto it until morning, when I set it down in full light. The poem that followed is a meditation on those intervals—the thresholds of consciousness and the veils through which the soul moves in its waking and its dreaming.

What begins as a reflection on the daily arc—from sunrise to sunset—soon turns inward, toward the more uncertain passage between dusk and dawn, where memory, time, and identity unravel and reweave. The Heraclitean epigraph provides the key: “The waking have one common world, but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.” Yet even that distinction, perhaps, is not so firm as it seems.

The accompanying painting—Whistler’s Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket—mirrors the poem’s atmosphere: its drift between form and dissolution, its reverent wondering, its silence punctuated by brief illumination. Together, word and image ask not what life is, but whether it is lived or dreamed—and what remains of us in either case.

Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket James McNeill Whistler (c. 1872–1877) Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 46.6 cm (23.7 × 18.3 in) Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit
James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket
c. 1872–1877 | Oil on canvas, 60.3 × 46.6 cm
Detroit Institute of Arts, Detroit

Betwixt the Spheres

by Donald S. Yarab

“The waking have one common world,
but the sleeping turn aside each into a world of his own.”
—Heraclitus, Fragment 89

Betwixt the dawn’s gold-burnished, trembling rise,
And evening’s hush where embered echoes gleam,
A soul drifts outward under waking skies—
Or inward, through the latticework of dream.

Morning declares the world as firm and real,
Noon lays its claim in certainties and fire,
Yet twilight draws the veil we cannot feel,
And sings the hush of unfulfilled desire.

The hours fall like leaves from unseen trees,
Their passage soft, impermanent, and strange.
Some name it life, who walk it by degrees—
While others call it dream, and feel no change.

So tell me, when the final light has flown,
And silence hangs, unbroken and immense—
Was it a road we walked, and called our own,
Or but a fleeting spark in dream’s pretense?

But what of time when sun has slipped from sight,
And stars drift forth like seeds of the unknown?
What voice is heard within the hush of night,
When all the world lies still, and we—alone?

Between and betwixt the dusk and morning’s grace,
A different kind of being comes to bloom:
Where shadows speak, and time forgets its place,
And long-dead voices gather in the gloom.

In sleep, the veil grows thin, the borders bend,
And hours bleed into realms that none can chart.
The soul recalls what lies beyond the end,
And bears the hush of ages in its heart.

These hours are not lost—they are the deep,
The ocean floor where buried visions gleam.
From them we rise, like wanderers from sleep,
Still marked by fire, still echoing the dream.

So stands the soul, on thresholds vast and wide,
Between and betwixt the turning of the spheres—
What seemed a life, a dream walks at its side,
Measured not in hours, but in wonder—and in tears.

The Unopened Book

by Donald S. Yarab

Scholar in His Study by Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn, 1634
Oil on canvas, 141 × 135 cm
Collection of the National Gallery Prague, Schwarzenberg Palace
© National Gallery Prague

The unopened book, its spine uncreased,
rests on the shelf, untouched by breath.
No hand has turned its waiting leaves,
no eye has met its silent depths.

The pages sleep in folded time,
ink unmoved by thought or light—
a universe uncalled to mind,
a star unkindled in the night.

Who knows what worlds it might contain—
a lover’s vow, a tyrant’s fall,
a name that once was yours or mine,
a deathless truth, a whispered call?

The story never yet begun
is writ in ink that does not fade.
Its fate, unlike the morning sun,
has neither risen nor decayed.

And yet—another book lies bare,
its binding worn, its chapters told.
The margins smudged by time and care,
its tale rehearsed a thousandfold.

We read, we skip, we turn again,
we bookmark thoughts we dare not bind—
then falter near the closing lines,
no meaning fixed, no end designed.

A narrative half-read, half-lost,
its final thought left unexpressed—
the thread unwinds, the ink runs dry,
the reader dozes, unconfessed.

Between the two—a paradox:
the never read, the half-complete.
Which holds the weight of what we are?
Which better marks our own defeat?

Perhaps all books are mirrors dim,
reflecting what we dare not see:
the start we fear, the end we flee,
the truths we touch but never free.

So let it lie, unopened still,
or let it fall apart, well-worn—
the soul is both the waiting page,
and every word we leave unborn.

I Am Undone

The vague glimmer of a head suspended in space
 (1891, Lithograph)
Odilon Redon (1840–1916)

I Am Undone

I.

It came not with fury, nor with fire.
Not a blow, but a breath withheld.
A stillness uncoiling in the spine.
I did not cry out. I did not fall.
I said only—I am undone.
And the words were true,
though I did not yet know
how much they would mean.

 

II.

The star chart curled into ash.
Landmarks dimmed, receded,
folded into fog.
I had names once—
for the road, the self, the longing.
They rusted in my mouth.
I said again, am I—
but the word faltered.
Was I I? Was am still?
Was undone the end, or only
a door swinging inward with no floor?

 

III.

I wandered, perhaps.
Or stood still and the world wandered past.
The days no longer linked.
Events occurred—but not to me.
Faces mouthed shapes I could not
hear or remember.
I touched a wall that had always been there.
It crumbled under my hand.
I called it home, or meant to.
Or once had.
I think.

Un—done—I am—undone am I—
I am…am I…?

 

IV.

And the past…
no, the shape before the past—
was it mine?
Or borrowed from the eyes of others?
Their eyes are gone.
The mirror does not
answer.
I meant to say a thing—
some thing—
a small
        thing—
but the mouth no longer forms
what the mind no longer sends.

There is no forward.
There is no back.
There is no—

(no is)

 

V. Dissolution

I think I said—I was—
no. I had said.
Once.

Undone.
It was the word. I said it.
Before.
Or after.
I do not—

No shape to the day.
No frame to the thought.
They come—go—
without edge.

The name of the thing
was… not there.
And the word for that—
what was the word?
The word is gone.
The knowing is
not.

I am
        am I
                un—
        not
     not done—
            not I—
      I—was

(was?)

And now—