1. How deep the universe, how dark and filled with light What comes after myth, after the tale about the woman and the beast, the jaded field, the lonely hill, the tree that opens up but only once; all of it is there in the stars, our unholy past we like the past writ large; but what comes after Beatrice shows Dante the multifoliate rose what’s left to fill the void, besides the nebulae and other ethereal showers streaming across the sky just stars and stars and stars 2. I’m standing on the last corner of land, it runs down to the sea, a pebble beach It’s night, pre-dawn, and I am alone I’ve walked down here in y sleep I’m trying to find a path to the stars; tonight the Milky Way is brilliant, so close. I want to enter the breathing, wandering Stygian dark: there’s something there I need The wet grass, stones don’t wake me. I suppose I expect the planets to be stone cold Only the lapping of the Atlantic at my knees and a voice that found me absent between two parting dreams awakens me 3. you can be weaned from the things of the world -Rilke Some night when we think—I could tonight I could sleep out under the stars wrapped perhaps in Cygnus wings swept up, enveloped, enfolded in bright arms, drawn an empyrean shawl—we sense behind the stars there’s somthing infinite imprisoned in our limits (the cruelty of families, the misery of cities, the incomprehensibility of law) lying under the inscrutable sky we touch the sweet possibility of the infinite something, and the weight of misery holding us down, but if for one instant we let it g into the tremendousness, into the weightless universe (one song), wouldn’t we lose ourselves? (we’re so afraid, so suckled to the weight, we turn away) 4. You may perceive Uksawnee as simply luminous atmospheric phenomenon, aurora borealis, a luminous arc lying across the magnetic meridian or filaments, streamers, fans, flames, auroral clouds triggered by a solar wind, atomic particles emanating from sunspots, but then you’ve never heard them sing, never whistled and banged and begged them to bend down, never believed you could make them, this longest of nights, dance to your tune, reach down almost touch you, before you run inside you see, Inuit children believe that if the hovering flaming Uksawnee touch you, you die We never perceive anything fully, nor comprehend completely, the rest depends on dreams 5. Just standing on earth under a night sky is a journey of vast undertaking. On the sea, tundra, plains the first thing we did was name the stars Orion going down, or Venus rising Something happens at night—the buffer blue sky disappears and a universe comes crashing in We don’t mind, we like the stars close, we long to bind, bate, engrave them, make them our own We’re still hunters tracking, explorers extravagantly lost in the uncharted archipelagos, the trackless waste What do we know of rift valleys, of the celestial floor spreading away from its centre or the violent phases of the moon’s craters or the long dark tracts between the stars Just standing on earth under a night sky is a journey so dangerous we might never get back A Necessary Darkness, Heather Pyrcz
Posted on: Sat, 13 Jul 2013 13:37:16 +0000
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