unknowing – Northcoast Antiquarian

The Cusan Sky

When color fails and sepia ascends,
it is not a lesser kingdom taking the throne—
it is the throne admitting
it was always borrowed light.

Blue steps down first,
humblest of the courtiers,
having pretended sky long enough.
Then green,
then every noon-loud hue,
filing out like a court dismissed
from a kingdom never theirs.

What ascends is not a color at all
but the confession beneath color—
the brown of old earth,
old paper,
old bone,
the ground from which all colors briefly rose,
waiting
the way silence waits
under every word
that thought itself necessary.

This is not dusk.
Dusk still bargains with the sun.
This is the sky
relinquishing every borrowed name,
becoming itself
by what it is no longer—

not red,
not gold,
not the day you expected,
but the day before adjectives.

Silence as Falling

By Donald S. Yarab

ὁδὸς ἄνω κάτω μία καὶ ὡυτή

“The way up and the way down are one and the same.”
—Heraclitus, Fragment 60 (Diels–Kranz); cf. Fragment 69 (Kirk & Raven)

When the mind enclosed reels, the frame gives way—
No border left to mark the night from day.
No cry, no anchor, only this descent
Where meaning bleeds and thought is all but spent.

It is not drift, but failure to remain—
The loosening of self from shape, from name.
It does not seek, nor struggle, nor insist—
It simply ceases, lost beyond all reach.

No wind attends, no witness marks the trace,
No voice declares the vanishing of place.
The silence is not peace, but what survives
When all the scaffolds break, and none revives.

No hand to hold, no vow left to defend—
One thought still clings—then breaks before the bend.
Just falling, falling, not to sky or land,
But into being none can understand.