The Counterpoint of Ponder, O Morpheus, the Night Sky
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.
Northcoast Antiquarian 