In some eyes you see the indigo dregs left by twilights as they
fade—
a wing that remains, a shadow of absence.
Such eyes are made to distinguish even the very last trace of
melancholy,
to see in the rain an inventory of lost blessings
just as an inner winter is needed
“to behold the frost and the junipers shagged with ice”
Wallace Stevens said, freezing the ears and the eye’s pupil,
turned maybe into the snowman who contemplates the nothing
with the nothing
and who hears only the wind
with no gospel that mightn’t be the unique sound of the wind
(though maybe it will speak of the greatest possible bareness,
not clarity).
But I know that everything dark is only explored using the night
I have,
that the rock half opens before the rock
in the same way as the heart is weighed with its abyss.
Is there any other way of peering right down to the deepest subsoil,
to the depths of another wound, of another hell?
There’s no other lamp for examining what’s close, what’s strange,
what’s distant.
It’s shown by the elusive meaning of the rat’s squeal between its
glass walls,
as it slips on the ladder of some unconceivable light;
the star proclaims it with its distant code that’s tied to a certain
trembling,
maybe to someone’s death, someone already gone;
it’s confirmed by the I that walks with you and is memory wherever
you forget,
and by that vast glittering other
that emerges for a meeting under the water of transformations,
and sometimes isn’t person or colour, or perfume or any trace of
this world.
Both are spun from the exact substance of silence.
They resemble God in his version as reversible guest:
the soul that inhabits you is also the gaze of the sky that includes you.
