This poem was featured in Plough magazine, November 2023
Bright burning embers fall to sombre coals,
And, in the morning light, the emptied nook
Seems the sole darkness on which eye may look,
In such a room, where whites make brilliant wholes
Of drapes and spreading carpet, couch and china bowls.
But there, that lately-burning mouth
Now speaks of shadow and of drouth,
As if to shame our dog-eared fireside book;
Its story of a marriage made
And sentiments that never fade,
Brought by the fire's fainting flash
To seem as fragile as a bough of ash.
And ash, indeed, the world has often been.
The much-loved friend and confident, in time,
Returns but to remind you of some crime
Of youth, committed while the mind was green
But knew already what the errant will could mean;
The boy you followed home to beat
Then made a coward's quick retreat,
Your knuckles smeared with sweat and dust and grime.
He represents what you'd forget,
The foolish plot or night's regret,
Not with his words, but in his face
Whose lines seem like a script the eye may trace.
No shortage of reminders such as this;
They come, alas, just when some touch of pride
Has made the world seem glass on which to glide;
Just when we think that there is no abyss
Waiting to greet our blithe face with a sloppy kiss.
That thing you said to someone's harm
Which you had thought a sign of charm,
But now see no one near you could abide;
The casual dishonesty
To show the world that you were free
Now shows itself for what it was:
A mere enchantment at one's own applause.
These, we know, are the wounds of vanity.
The voice within reports that we are great
And lulls us to believe it with sweet bait
That feeds the hungry ear on fantasy,
And shouts down every voice that dares to disagree
With what it offered as the case.
But then, that voice will spin in place
And where it praised before, now snarls with hate
At how the world's a mass of flies
That procreates and feeds and dies,
That savours vice, that lives for power
And never knows a kind or noble hour.
Yet, even in the silence of the mind,
Chastened and clarified, we sense indeed
The world's a wilderness where all things bleed,
Its cities bombed, its people scarred and blind,
Its fruits grown overripe and eaten to the rind
Though all still hunger. Who could say
It's just imagination play
That finds a father's murder or his greed
Endemic to the life we know?
Whatever else the world may show,
It finds time for the child whom
A cold indifference severs from the womb.
These ashes in the fire, these half-burnt logs
Left blackened, riven, and disintegrating
Behind the scorched and bent and weathered grating
Will give themselves away as analogues
For grave and petty wounds the psyche catalogues.
If evil's the enduring fact
So is this way our minds react
To find out figures for our contemplating,
This doubling of things as signs
Which opens them as it defines
And helps the intellect to see
Even within the darkest mystery.
Such is the strangeness of most beauty's birth.
Amid the battered armour on the field,
Some victor paints a crest upon his shield
And vows to treat the weak as things of worth.
A fixed stare on the crumbling deep of blackest earth
Will find concealed within that sight
The thought of everlasting light.
The open wound shows how it may be healed.
We would not choose to learn this way.
Why can't the mind know only day?
Surely the form of truth does not
Require acquaintance first with death and rot.
Imagine, for a moment, such a place
As saints and wise men sometimes tell us of;
A place not here, but, in a sense, above,
Where all is light and plentitude and grace;
No abstract thing, it meets us with a radiant face.
On sight, we know that we are blest
To find in it perpetual rest.
This alone is the object of our love,
And could we know it from the start
The soul would never once depart.
But, here, in battered things, we find
Faint traces that will summon it to mind.
What, for some other sort of creature, may
Seem a distraction from that elegance,
For us has the necessity of dance,
Its suffering that reorders us for play,
Its discipline that strengthens those who first obey.
Some of us sense it and draw back,
Refuse to name this thing we lack,
But savour its sensation of a trance,
As if that were the most of it,
And not a sign to make us fit
For that long passage now begun
Which scatters us before it makes us one.
How curious that what transcends all things
Should choose to hide itself within them too,
And pierce the sky's finality of blue.
What seems the last is but the first of rings
That from the dark whirls outward on extended wings.
Thus in the empty living room,
Out of the vanished fire's tomb,
Such veering thoughts will sometimes come to you.
They settle in the memory
Whose eyes, with failing vision, see
Inside those ashes that appear
A brilliance, distant, foreign, and yet clear.
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