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.
