Tag: philosophical poetry

Lest I See

Here at the end of all my winding days,
behind me look I shall not, lest I see
what well I know, yet shrink to look upon:
one set of prints, and none beside my own.
Yet worse, and past all bearing of the heart,
to turn, and find the green grass ris’n again
where I had passed, and not a print of me,
no sign whatever that I once had been.

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.

AUSTERE HOUSE

Beginnings stretch outward.
A trembling breath lingers.
Silence gestates
before the word is spoken.
The air holds still,
struck through with sensation,
as the unseen gathers
toward its trembling.

What do I see?
A shadow
escorted like a cenotaph,
a face dissolved
through clouds of doctrine.

What do I hear?
The long decay
of a voice grown old,
a quarrel flowering again
in the rooms of forgetting;
names abandoned,
a litany of the missing,
whose silence now
cuts more savagely
than their speech ever did.

What do I know?
I carry
the weight of not-knowing,
and raise from absence
its austere house.
Less than I imagine,
less than I understand.
Yet more
than I dare remember,
I hold.

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.

Unmapped, the Way

Discombobulated am I,

but matters it not.

The wind knows no grammar;

the rain has forgot.

Unraveled the morning,

unmapped, the way—

yet onward the light moves,

indifferent, the day.