The Form of the Good

I.

And none of that which chance has led us to invent;

and not that hill we climb to where the wind has scattered


from us everything--- and tears, and night, and death

which lends to our mourning the appearance

of that permanence whose stern existence comes only

from the falling light. 


               And we are not the things we dare

to question and, even less, that which our arrogance labors

to be.  For we will at last lay down

before the green meadow of our nativity

our crown of innocence:  for we were born

in that summer, when already the warm breath

of a someone we may have never known

had sent her love and we inbreathed

her breezing invitation into that very room.

And after ten years or even centuries

of waiting we will still fail to know the great

compassion with which a moth one night

beat his wings

surrendering the desire of seven centuries

into the limit of an illuminated screen.

And that light which she knows

and is still shines its swooning collision

with our heart like some final Yes

which we have owed forever.


II.

We repeat the question, and a voice which

yields its force and aspiration melts into

the gentle heaven of a half-hour's silence.

But to this question, do not dare to say 'myself';

nor dare invoke the so-called journeying

towards a knowledge which will never be.

What is not already will not be,

if it is not already so; and though we are not yet

that staying with us  always-presence, that rest

whose deep breath will bow in its bright bright

absence, a low unrequited murmur—

we are bright absence, though not of sight

but of an expectation best imagined

by what has not been, nor can be, thought.

And we cannot escape this light for we are a here

and knowing freedom that will forever tumble

down the golden hill.  We are the afternoon

whose warmth surpasses that of morning.


And who does not yet swim in the placid

lake of an all-forgetting syllable?  And who

does not swim eternally to the bright surface

of the warm green sea?


III.

And once we walked beneath December,

when stars hung above us,

a chandelier of innocence that will never fall.

And we knew the air was adequate for everything.

And we knew this night as the night before

our very birth.  Light falls and the mind

relaxes into the birth of its own memory.

Our eyes squint still into the blue

of our apparent depths that

pours through every window

that we have ever noticed.

Is this too but a sign of that high image,

a spectacle whose painting is so stern

and perfect that it was never attempted?

And who could render any of these forms,

moonlight and wind, sunset and radiance,

whose expectation strains so that their very

absence is made present with a sighing,

that in the present stillness will never

be mistaken for sadness or even tears?