Issue 17, April 1998
David Donlon - Poem

Tell me the meaning, what meaning there is
In the bright sun seen out of a kitchen
Window, refracted through glass, while the drip-
Dripping of the faucet gives time it's edge;
Or in the world turning away from the sun
As it has ever done Sunday evenings,
Or tell me what meaning there is in my
Insistence on Sunday evenings and then
We have started. I have heard it said that
Now is the pleasant, the cool, the quiet
Though not silent hour before the moon
In its full orbed power fills the landscape with
The reflected light, and with highlighted
Shadow takes off the mask of things. The
Shadows will all grow to a length in their
Hour; see, they know it, and will not cease
Their encroach. Yet the light finds surfaces
To gleam upon; this light that shines and gives form
And color to noon, but fades into deep
And deeper grays at twilight; this light
That warms our sense and brings the knower
To the known. Light is time.

  
II

I watch the shadows grow vital and long,
The light flees to higher and higher ground
Until at last the mountains cut it off
From it's source, and it seeps along the
Streets, in retreat, circling about the lightpoles
Coming on. Dark's army, incorporeal,
And mortal, is marching -- soon entrenched
All along Madison avenue.

_____________________ it
Is quiet. A few souls in pairs, voices
Lost in the miasmal dark, are out, going
To or away from some more brightly lit,
More vivid existence. Ah! Suck the shadowy
Air awhile into your lungs, breathe it thick!
Oh waywards -- if you did not send out such
Lights of your own how the night would change you!
Can you feel the livid weight of life
Penetrated where you wrap it, shell like
In form?

____________ I am a connoisseur of darks,
And this is my resume, so see:
I have tasted the dew laden gusts of
Spring evenings, drank in a hot Hattiesburg
Night, the air molten and thick with water;
I have savored the cool, dry edge of
Phoenix at dawn, and tasted the moonlit 
Pacific salt of dark rocks and gleaming foam.
All these darks unique and unrepeatable, yes, but
The air at night is always absolute.

III

The sweet hot odor of asphalt is rising;
A seductive gust blows boxwood. Grass and
Cat's piss mingle, waft, and tease the nose; then,
More boxwood. A door slams. I recall
A gloomy night, years ago, when I thought
About the mystery of dark -- when, in
A motor-boat on the river, its
engine cracking and spitting like some
Phlegmatic miser threatening to cut
His losses and simply die, we heard,
Between the bouts of cursing, before
The sparking motor coughed, behind the
Whisper of wind, a silence we all know
Along the waterway; the soundless dark,
Thick and obvious. With no preamble
Somehow the motor caught. The sudden swift
Motion! The night! It obliterated
The river. Only the wind on our faces
And a few distant lights served as our link
To boundaries. We were at one with the
Whirl of Chaos; at one with timeless dark.
This, I thought, is something. When I felt
My wet grip on the gunwale I had no proof
Of more to my reality than my fingers, nose
Heart and cloying tongue. Had I toppled back
Would the smooth water have enveloped me
With the caress of divinity? Do you know?
Because, as in caves, I sensed that prior
Divinity, entombed and forgot beneath
Human thought, like that we sense where ancient
Men rendered on cavern walls shapes of
Errorless grace. Now that is something.
Primal caves. Smoke and pigment in the dark.
Beasts long since recalled into the dreamworld.
Whose fingers? With what art? Such a subtle wonder
Inhabits those forms that their eternal charge
Haunts us still. We ought to fear them like gods.

IV

This city changes in darkness, but not
So you would notice. Follow the wind, as
Drunken revelers careen, laughing, past
The all night deli. The wind swirls
In the murky street, across from the
Darkened buildings of the University,
Which stand resolute, forbidding,
Absolutely, any legal entrance into
Their domain. (There is that army
From before, standing guard upon the door.)
Can night-knowledge be so despised? 
But let them sleep. Nights as these, whether marked
By us or not, have ever passed, are passing
And will pass, in some eternal moment.
Look, there's a rat, sniffling and worrying,
How he slinks along the gutter so quiet
And low; that is his emergent ratness.
Just so have all rats crept to the crypt of
Permanence. What? Now I am reeling!
I have lost my balance here, suggesting
Forms are tombs! Now that is really something.
But let it pass -- Let our rat vanish in
The night and hope he meets a lucky end,
Or by god's grace let the cat be lucky.

For what are we but vibrations on a string,
Wrapped, loose or tight, around a tubed membrane?
Have we eleven dimensions? Or ten?
I will go ask the mathematician
For my new world view, and he will say,
‘Today it appears that our vibrations
Are in n dimensions, not particles
Glued together, mind you, as we supposed,
But vibrations -- it is illusion,
A trick of the light, which gives rise to form.'
Ah, but the Buddha told us that before.
In time the mathematician will change
His mind, or seem to, in the fresh light
Of new evidence, and with his words make
New worlds; such power has his poetry,
For time is but one of his dimensions,
And is pliable in his wizard hands.

Then have we now reversed St. John, and flesh
Become words, defined now loose, now tight?
But the professor of Deconstruction
Bids me think that words are nothing alone,
Until they take their supplements. I say
Do the math; well fed words, then, will we be,
By the old law ‘Ye shall be what ye eat.'

Oh, the night is damned alright, and we are
Lucky enough to hold our forms against
Such onslaughts as these we nightly suffer.

V

Strings of silver boxes snake their way
From east to west and back again, hooting
In the night like lovelorn, plaintive owls -- when,
Where, why do they go? Chugga-chugging oil
Slick silver snakes, like clockwork, on time, or
Just off, or very late -- yet on time enough
For us to know the hour. Late, very late.
I remember reading, or seeing on
Some indolent midnight-oil burning
Production, shown during those hours which
The blissfully benumbed never know, yet
The fitful, uneasy-awake know and
Count among their living moments as time
Spent away from the cause of unease and
Therefore as time well spent -- where was I now?
The train. There was a circus train, back in
The days of circuses, when the t.v.
Hadn't yet been discovered as the best
Benumber, Nineteen and Twenty-nine, to
Be exact, in Bloomington Illinois;
A terrible accident. The animals
Screamed in the night -- the elephant's legs were
Smashed, and she lay on her side heaving until
The sheriff shot her in his mercy. The bear
Blinded, rambled through the quaint suburban
Countryside, confused and moaning, too hurt
To live until the dawn. The strongman joined
Her in death, whimpering his own chorus
Of pain. Some say they still hear the whimpers
And moans on foggy nights while the air is
Thick and windless. Yet why would they linger?
What force on this earth could make them stay?
You ghosts -- you stay beyond your hour,
Expecting something -- I see you testing the
Rails for signals that never come; I see
You standing dumbly while the cars of
Other days flash and burn by your shadows.
I really do see them, here, on this street
For my mind has called them, and here is where
All crushed spirits return when called, here, out
Of the light they gather around me, formless
And begging.

__________________ We do not fear the dead. It
Is the changing life within us, the wheel
revolving, charging along the tracks, lights
Illuminating unknown terrors ahead,
The snapping jaws of oblivion behind,
And strange shades falling by on either side.
We do not fear the dead, for they reside
Only in our memories, locked in our
Conceptions, and powerless. We fear the
Pregnant maw of formlessness and oblivion.
It is the shadows . . . the shadows . . . they catch the
Eye.

__________ My how the streetlights sway in this wind.

  
VI

Hush now, be still. I hear a voice singing
Sweet urgings in the wind, out in the dark:
When you acknowledge me, on that day I
Will sing; I will sing to the skies, and they
Will sing to the earth, and the earth will sing
To the plants of the field, and they will sing
To every living thing. It is the song
Of eternity, the song of kinship.
The song is real and it is holy.

We must not profane it with our faithless
Talking. But then what shall we do?

Now here comes the town drunk (or one of them)
Like Lear he staggers in his disbelief;
Unsupported, naked, outcast -- martyr
To his own woe. He intends, I think, to
Sleep somewhere on that wide green lawn, up the
Dark hill. He is determined to do it.
I have seen him roll half the night into
A heap on the sidewalk, marking it as
His own. He crawls up to his feet, needing
Something the night possesses, something up
The hill. I have never seen a man so
Determined. Leave him free to complete his
Design? No, he never had designs. He
Is an empty vessel, and some other
Power either fills him and tips him
Into mysterious cups, or leaves him
Thus empty, sick, alone. Blame whichever
God you choose. The bum blames booze.

VII

At last the stillness I love best descends:
Here is where the moment begins; the time
That really counts, out here in the dark
Among the sounds and smells, where you can still
See the wavey whorls of chaos creeping
When you look down the long, deserted street.
This is Gödell's law. The frame is shown cracked
At every edge; we are not so well contained
As we had hoped. Forms waver on the brink.
To be here is a dicey business. Here
Is some eternal essence, where order
Meets its edge and a decision is reached
About the boundary. And every night
It's the same argument -- the same play of
Forces. How can anyone know what keeps
The sun's light coming? Who can guarantee
The morning? I shudder against the cool
Brick wall on 14th street and feel my clothes
Moisten with dew, eternally patient.
Who, Me? No. The cloth. The brick. The dew.


VIII

The forces begin to grow restless.
With the sun waiting around the world's edge,
Here is where the battle will be pitched
As the minions of darkness make their last
Stand against the light. The glowy troops
Around the light poles, nearly vanquished,
With their last strength revive and receive their
Succor from the eastern tint. The minions
Swirl in confusion, tear their frocks and steal
Back into recesses in dismay and
Disorder. They go sliding down storm
Sewers, into the boles of trees, and under
Bellies of low, crawling things. Oh, how beaten!
How dispersed! What the moon oversaw
As fair victory, in time turns
With the sun's coming, and shadows
Fall to become slaves of the quick.
All the will has gone out the night.
At last the morning gloom begins, and night
Is lifted; the troops march back into
The foothills, and guard close the walls. No more
Voices are heard, or have been for hours
Except for the hushing swish of wind
And thrum of passing cars. It is time again.

IX

At last we return from our all night vigil,
Back to the drip, dripping faucet, back to
Cheap linoleum and cracked drywall,
To see the sallow light reflecting through
The window, as the world spins us in
Time again. The day brightens. See! The light
Shines on us and we are full of holes, full
Of shadows; nothing can penetrate us
That has not already. We and the night
Are one, as unfinished around the edges,
As sticky about boundaries. No edge
Is sealed for ever. No form an Ideal.
Yet my edge is sealed. Ha ! For the moment.
That is just a pithy thought, a template
for some grander design it will not fit.
Our idea of completeness is the culprit,
For the complex will never admit it.
The set of all meanings remains -- in spite
Of what logic, what system, what mind
Attempts to rule -- undefined. What comes to
Light, what is grasped, what achieves consciousness
Will ever be a bounded circle in
An infinite field. The mathematician
On the hill knows this: No formal system
Remains complete; contradictions are wove
Into the seams -- it is method is the
Stuff of dreams. Now that is really something.
Out the window I am looking for the bum,
To see what he has become, because it
Makes every difference. The university sits
In its daylight splendor, and there he is
Snoring under an elm, still a minion
Of the dark after all this time. But the
Light, given chance, will crack him like a seed.
What was never well contained will then spill
Out again, and at last he will be more
Than anyone's designs can describe -- which
Is, I have no doubt, what he always was.