The Light that Knows that It Will Die
Sometimes dawn is aching, golden tears
that shine across a crumpled sky,
condensation of countless hopes and fears,
a light that knows that it will die.
We rise at morning;
we go our ways
with busy hands
through busy days,
with toil and worry
remembered and forgot
and busy minds
in distractions of thought;
but still a whisper,
an echo, an ache,
of not enough time
to do or to make.
Sometimes a dawn is an aching thing,
human heart shining through human eye,
small and frail; yet still it spreads its wings,
this light that knows that it will die.
The Poem
The poem is beyond doubt and certainty;
it is an obvious and ambiguous whole,
both exactly as it presents itself
and but a corner of the dimly known.
Read it once and its words are primary,
marks and sounds on the page and air;
read it twice and the words are nothing
but themes and images everywhere.
A poem is a thing contingent,
an artifact of spirit within;
but a poem cannot be prevented,
being necessary in all that it is.
It is a visceral thing that we sense;
it is an idea no senses can see;
it is fish, it is fowl, it is red herring,
the child of a spirit born free.
We speak with it, person to person,
we sympathize with it, face to face,
though it is not a person, has no faces,
except where thought dances and plays.
Only the intellect can know it;
it is beyond a mere intellect to know;
it suggests divine madness and glory
from strange realms no intellect goes;
for it is like the mind, its father,
and resembles its mother, the mind,
which is divine in its nature and power,
yet weak, for it is not divine.
Jove
This morning I spoke with Jove
in the campus parking lot.
It was stuffy, humid, hot,
and as below, so above;
he was looking, he said, for work,
some fair, livable wage
in this thoughtless, surly age
where enlightenment itself is dark,
and fortune, it seemed, did not smile.
He made the lightning fall;
I happily watched it all
and listened to the clouds awhile.
Soft rain sprinkled down as Jove and I
talked of long-lost things,
cyclops-bolts and magic rings,
trees that walked, stones that cried.
Then he sighed and drove away
to some future yet unknown;
for the pride of man has grown
and the titan-hosts invade.
