Lux aeterna

Part I: Aether

A pale light shines through the threadbare world,

a cold luminous presence over which the world rests like gauze,

a milky white light that lingers in the mist

and comes to rest in the dew drops that are threaded,

like pearls,

on a spider's web on a cold morning,

before it is wrecked by the ruinous chance

of a passing child’s exuberance.

It is a light denied.

We sense it with our eyes shut,

half asleep,

and it shyly recedes when we awaken

before we can notice it.

Does it illuminate our dreams?

Is it a residue of refraction that escapes explanation?

Certainly, no microscope finds it. It registers on no instrument.

It sits behind the light our eyes can see.

It blows through us in ghostly gusts,

leaves no imprint where we lay out film to make a record,

is not embroiled in our retinas, eludes the traps we lay for it,

slips through the net and avoids the snare of sense. 

I must disaggregate myself entirely to lure it into my grasp. 

I sink my cold, brine-filled lungs to the bottom of the sea.

I cast my eyes among the worn shingle orbs upon the shore.

I stack my weary bones where fences need mended,

let the wind spin my hair into bog-cotton,

let my breath escape into the clouds,

before it becomes truly crystal clear to me,

and I feel the light

and wander in stunned silence,

vanishing into the infinite mist of my trance,

a mist that brings me only the most distant and diffuse light,

drops light that adheres to anything recognisable to the ground like a stone,

and transmits only pure light free from the vulgarity of objects,

and I see beyond the dull diurnal description of things,

find them tedious, these rude intrusions that interrupt my ecstasy,

tripping me up with their misplaced urgency,

their insistence padding out our daily barter and trade,

dyes that stain our fingers as we thumb and rub

and try out the fabric of the world in the marketplace

with words drained of any colour

that can catch this infinite paleness

which confounds our trials and reckoning

with its ungovernable billowing,

always taken out of reach by gusts

from unseasonal siroccos.

Part II: the Moon

She is well known, meticulously described, thoroughly documented:

she shines with a reflected light; men have walked upon her;

she is an inert stone slung upon an orbit apples might share;

and so on.

But to my infinitely dispersed self she seems to shine

with another light that is not caught in that net of words,

a light that reveals this earth is just as cratered and lifeless

when seen beyond the scope of human sight, from our orbit

in the stark and barren brightness of the void, and all our follies,

our fret and fuss, our boasts and monuments, our footprints on the Moon

are ageless dust to which we have no real claim,

and the hopes and fears of those that made them mean nothing.

With every effort possible we try to trap the light: every stem of every quaver

and minim, every stroke of every pen committed by artist, poet or composer

every strut of logical scaffold with which our arguments are supported,

even every strip of lead in the stained glass windows of St Denis,

where the light blasted holes in the walls of old Romanesque Europe, every rib

of every vaulted space where thoughts dwell and find their compass

in the leisurely speculations of men pacing in dedication to knowledge,

is a bar in a cage we think we make to contain the light,

and we justify the trespass we attempt upon it with a promise

of a lantern in which the light peers through the bailing wire,

cradled in this Pharos with which we hope to show the way ahead,

as though we were lost,

as though we could ever be found,

as though we are anything more than passing eddies twisting in the ancient dust,

until eventually we discover that in fact the cage contains, not it, but us,

once we are released at last from the prison we make for ourselves,

and finally walk into the light.