I Long For Words
I long for words that don’t exist;
I long for a light
that my eyes have never flowered in before,
but hope is a gravedigger
singing in a pit
and I removed those bones long ago
to accommodate the newly dead.
Now I conduct night-classes under a bridge
for working constellations.
And I don’t really know what I’d say
if the silence were ever
to shape the urn of my voice
into an uncontainable emptiness again;
so that every dropp of dew
on every blade of grass,
while the moon rose
through the broad-leaved basswood grove
were wrapped like a sky
in the skin of my eyes.
What can be understood
is already slurred by signs,
and the best way to hide
is to go looking for yourself.
Forgetting for the moment
that ignorant doors
are not looking for enlightened keys,
maybe I would still try to express
that first dark kiss
of the original fountain-mouth
that stepped out of the tide of an eclipse
like an island or a woman
who wore the shore of her own shapeshifting body
to walk like a watershed into consciousness.
But the light cloaks as well as reveals
and eventually the eyes
evaporate into their visions,
and the hearts of the seers
hang like drops of blood
above the cold and empty cauldron of the universe.
Time and suffering
will enlighten the profound folly
of your most sacred delusion
and in a black lightning flash
before the arising of signs
you’ll know whose signature the wind is.
How many tomorrows ago,
furious and young,
did I make a ladder
out of violated thresholds
to climb up to the window of a burning lighthouse
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poem by Patrick White
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