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Bright burning embers fall to somber coals,
[.poemindent] And, in the morning light, the emptied nook [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] Seems the sole darkness on which eye may look, [.poemindent]
In such a room, where whites make brilliant wholes
Of drapes and spreading carpet, couch and china bowls.
[.poemindent] But there, that lately-burning mouth [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] Now speaks of shadow and of drouth, [.poemindent]
As if to shame our dog-eared fireside book;
[.poemindent] Its story of a marriage made [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] And sentiments that never fade, [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] Brought by the fire’s fainting flash [.poemindent]
To seem as fragile as a bough of ash.
And ash, indeed, the world has often been.
[.poemindent] The much-loved friend and confidant, in time, [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] Returns but to remind you of some crime [.poemindent]
Of youth, committed while the mind was green
But knew already what the errant will could mean;
[.poemindent] The boy you followed home to beat [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] Then made a coward’s quick retreat, [.poemindent]
Your knuckles smeared with sweat and dust and grime.
[.poemindent] He represents what you’d forget, [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] The foolish plot or night’s regret, [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] Not with his words, but in his face [.poemindent]
Whose lines seem like a script the eye may trace.
No shortage of reminders such as this;
[.poemindent] They come, alas, just when some touch of pride [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] Has made the world seem glass on which to glide; [.poemindent]
Just when we think that there is no abyss
Waiting to greet our blithe face with a sloppy kiss.
[.poemindent] That thing you said to someone’s harm [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] Which you had thought a sign of charm, [.poemindent]
But now see no one near you could abide;
[.poemindent] The casual dishonesty [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] To show the world that you were free [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] Now shows itself for what it was: [.poemindent]
A mere enchantment at one’s own applause.
These, we know, are the wounds of vanity.
[.poemindent] The voice within reports that we are great [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] And lulls us to believe it with sweet bait [.poemindent]
That feeds the hungry ear on fantasy,
And shouts down every voice that dares to disagree
[.poemindent] With what it offered as the case. [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] But then, that voice will spin in place [.poemindent]
And where it praised before, now snarls with hate
[.poemindent] At how the world’s a mass of flies
[.poemindent] That procreates and feeds and dies, [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] That savors vice, that lives for power [.poemindent]
And never knows a kind or noble hour. [.poemindent]
Yet, even in the silence of the mind,
[.poemindent] Chastened and clarified, we sense indeed [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] The world’s a wilderness where all things bleed, [.poemindent]
Its cities bombed, its people scarred and blind,
Its fruits grown overripe and eaten to the rind
[.poemindent] Though all still hunger. Who could say [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] It’s just imagination’s play [.poemindent]
That finds a father’s murder or his greed
[.poemindent] Endemic to the life we know? [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] Whatever else the world may show, [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] It finds time for the child whom [.poemindent]
A cold indifference severs from the womb.
[.imgcaption] [.smalltext] Photograph by Tolga Ahmetler [.smalltext] [.imgcaption]
These ashes in the fire, these half-burnt logs
[.poemindent] Left blackened, riven, and disintegrating [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] Behind the scorched and bent and weathered grating [.poemindent]
Will give themselves away as analogues
For grave and petty wounds the psyche catalogues.
[.poemindent] If evil’s the enduring fact [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] So is this way our minds react [.poemindent]
To find out figures for our contemplating,
[.poemindent] This doubling of things as signs [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] Which opens them as it defines [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] And helps the intellect to see [.poemindent]
Even within the darkest mystery.
Such is the strangeness of most beauty’s birth.
[.poemindent] Amid the battered armor on the field, [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] Some victor paints a crest upon his shield [.poemindent]
And vows to treat the weak as things of worth.
A fixed stare on the crumbling deep of blackest earth
[.poemindent] Will find concealed within that sight [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] The thought of everlasting light. [.poemindent]
The open wound shows how it may be healed.
[.poemindent] We would not choose to learn this way. [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] Why can’t the mind know only day? [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] Surely the form of truth does not [.poemindent]
Require acquaintance first with death and rot.
Imagine, for a moment, such a place
[.poemindent] As saints and wise men sometimes tell us of;
[.poemindent] [.poemindent] A place not here, but, in a sense, above, [.poemindent]
Where all is light and plenitude and grace;
No abstract thing, it meets us with a radiant face.
[.poemindent] On sight, we know that we are blest [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] To find in it perpetual rest. [.poemindent]
This alone is the object of our love,
[.poemindent] And could we know it from the start [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] The soul would never once depart. [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] But, here, in battered things, we find [.poemindent]
Faint traces that will summon it to mind.
What, for some other sort of creature, may
[.poemindent] Seem a distraction from that elegance, [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] For us has the necessity of dance, [.poemindent]
Its suffering that reorders us for play,
Its discipline that strengthens those who first obey.
[.poemindent] Some of us sense it and draw back, [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] Refuse to name this thing we lack, [.poemindent]
But savor its sensation of a trance,
[.poemindent] As if that were the most of it, [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] And not a sign to make us fit [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] For that long passage now begun [.poemindent]
Which scatters us before it makes us one.
How curious that what transcends all things
[.poemindent] Should choose to hide itself within them too, [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] And pierce the sky’s finality of blue. [.poemindent]
What seems the last is but the first of rings
That from the dark whirls outward on extended wings.
[.poemindent] Thus in the empty living room, [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] Out of the vanished fire’s tomb, [.poemindent]
Such veering thoughts will sometimes come to you.
[.poemindent] They settle in the memory [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] Whose eyes, with failing vision, see [.poemindent]
[.poemindent] Inside those ashes that appear [.poemindent]
A brilliance, distant, foreign, and yet clear.
