I. Dawn Aurora
The nothing you know is as immaculate a knowing
as any moment moving from a distance into dawn.
All of the awakenings, or the old unconscious lies . . .
I’d waited all night, holed up in Selene’s derelict houseboat—
drinking tea, drinking Scotch, thinking of the rain
that night in Camden Town when she went missing for hours,
coming back only to say, Sayonara baby; thinking of
the way so many things touch their own fates. The motorcycle
heads for the cliff, or the bus stops just before the bench.
Everything seems more shabby in the dusk; everything glorious
holds its light. Look to your sons, look to your daughters.
Look to the blades rising out of the dark lawn. Don’t worry;
each of your myths remains emblazoned upon the air. The way
the wind moves across the vellum of the mountain,
as the silence lifts its chords from the old piano. In the still dark
& still uncertain dawn, there begins that slow revelation larger
than the mind’s, as the light grows coronal, & the house fills
with those elaborate agendas of the day. The monastery & philosophy
this morning, both seem so far away.
II. Lago di Como
The blood of the visible hangs like blossoms of bougainvillea
as they turn & twist along the lattice of limbs shading your
terrace, stretching like a ruby squid across one corner of the stone
villa above the lake. We sit looking out over the unqualified excellence
of the morning, & there is nothing you might desire to recall. You
believe in a space that is as large as logic, that is as logical as the word.
Tell me. What is the “beautiful,” what is the “lost,” & what lives still, just
at the edge of the sound of the trees? It could be the syllables of habit;
it could be a single phrase of gratitude . . . or an unbroken prayer. Tell me.
What will stay, & what will hold its grace & lasting ease?
III. Autumn Aurora
The illusionist steps to the stage. Everything
he claims will be, will be. I know because I’ve watched him
before the curtains began to part, & I’ve seen he is not just
one man, but he is also a woman. He is as multiple
as the rain. He is all children in the future—those children
both the woman & the man he is will bring from their couplings,
their embraces, & those silences of the clasped plural of their
nights, their individual nights. How have you left me? You have
left me with my hopes. How have you dreamed of me? You
have dreamed of me beneath the cool of the evening. There I am,
holding my dulcimer, holding my mandolin. There I am, singing
to you, always, singing to you, always, across the blade of time.
In the monograph of dawn, all of the tendencies of shifting light . . .
& now the bells are sounding. This evening, we will discover
only the fragrance of the October moon.
IV. Florentine Aurora
I saw what would proclaim itself as beauty-beyond-surface.
It was the rarest of days. I’d walked directly from the train station
& found the gallery empty, yet filled with a golden light as if dozens of
gilt bees rose lazily to the eaves, each a reflected particle of the afternoon.
It was a whole universe lifted by the painting; it was a universe that mirrored
the afternoon—& its singular burnishing within the painting—& the young
women, articulating the angles of desire, the hopeless erotic fortune
that proves itself in beauty. The shell of the day unfolding, the perfume of
the moment filling every pore we call the imagination. The day, today, seems
inexhaustible. This is my praise; this is my proclamation. This is the apple
I place on the white plate, before you. This is my metaphysics of possibility.
This is the fury of the present. This is the memory of the questions
I offer like pewter goblets. Let us share what remains, while it remains.
V. The Aurora Called Destiny
Selene was hearing voices again. It had become something
she was apt to do now & then; she heard the voices,
but she could not recall the names. . . . When she slept, voices
choired her into the heavens, & when she awoke they lay her
along the bed of dawn. She was precise & independent
in this illumination, & she found herself in the descent of many wings,
like a vortex of angelic understandings. Everything that seemed to sing
echoed in harmony around her, & the fevered happiness broke
like sweat along her skin. If the body shows it is the soft
white of wax, if the fox moves across the field & the white meadows
by the black woods, then what do we know of our deaths? What do we
know of the impossible weathers we must transcend?
What do we know of the milk
of the future & the milk of the end? Here is your destiny it is the color
of lapis & mirrors, of the glass which empties itself of time, of every
whisper. Here, at the oak dining table, place your palms upward facing, so
the sky can read the lines crossing there, & the grain of what remains.
This is not the epitaph you imagine. This is not some phantom
fear. Or else, I suppose, it is.
VI. The Swan
Nakedness only is never marriage, just as the pilgrim
looks beyond all fictive weavings of our oracles. In my notebook,
I keep my list of questions ready for the stranger at the crossroads:
How can I keep my life luminous, & how can I keep the day delivered?
Where does my constant taste for evasion end & the altar begin?
Where does the word become the Word, & why does the flesh remain flesh?
In the quiet of the park, the water spreads out before us, & the single
swan cuts across the water’s blackness like a piece of music, like the fall
of an iris upon the table at dawn. Where have the minstrels gone, where
the loves that were lifted up in fables like the mantles of sorcerers
& the manes of their stallions, that white, white hair? I believe
the blank wall
remains blank for several lifetimes, & then finally there is the inked reason
of the figure. Look, the stranger’s nails are lacquered silver, as she stands
at the roadside, white as light. There, with a feather boa & auras of the notice
we allow to be born of sexual repose, with the movement that becomes the very
fragrance of the vines, & all the pulses of afterward, & all the drowsy
refractions of her fatal, far-wingèd independence.
VII. Ghost Aurora
All of the apostles, the fortune-tellers, all of those committed
to the origins of reason or faith—each is now lost in the hum
of her or his own deepening meditation. What could be the purpose
of those songs the troubadour from Avignon brought us in his leather bag?
What could be the meaning of the carvings of green falcons along
the gourd-like back of his lute? What could be more useful than a loving
principle lifted slowly out of particles, like the frond of a morning fern
uncurling? Take up your coat; take up the morning. This is what it means
to lure the phantom out of the dark, until she lifts us into the space of song.
VIII. Aurore Parisienne
Selene became the pilot of her fate, dressed in careless breezes
& summer birds. Her sandals were stitched with fire & the summer moths
hovered at her toes. She shuffled in the chaos & she could not help, she said,
but drink the poison of her past, every mortal coil, every green core. All
those ancient probabilities echoed as she spoke, each in its own pastoral refrain,
like light lifted from a sepulcher, like the oblivion of the lamp & its cold globe
standing for the illumined but lost spirit. There, the abyss & the storm
& her desire all came to be one. If the forest beyond arose, it was the forest she
understood. Who else could move this way, except one already lost . . . as she said,
Think of me walking along the Seine, as I think of you in the twilight & the echo
of the day, lifting very slowly two ancient books before you . . . their songs arising still
even in the automatic flak of traffic, even as the swallows & martins slowly swirl.
IX. Père Lachaise
The names that have been unnamed arise, cold & clear
as the inscriptions upon the virgin stone. There, the rubies shone
against the onyx; there, those charnel house weathers, & the love
that must emerge like love. On the other side of the world, my
best friend dressed only in small brass cymbals. They were the size
of quarters & linked by either wire or cord. He had no idea what it
meant. He knew only as he moved each movement was announced by
the most glorious sound, chimes & rattles & an iridescence in the ear
the golden weather of himself shimmering everywhere. When they
found him later, dead, they said how pagan he’d become in his nakedness,
in his glory.
X. The Book
What is it about the motives of the night? All of those lovers
walking in the luster of their pasts. The strings of melody plucked
in the lightness of sleep.
What is it about the body
awakening beside you, rippling with that ultimate, jubilant fire?
Here in the strange, strange inn at the edge of the wood
there is the sacrifice of the leaves, all of the vestments abandoned.
All of the false stitching of the heraldry hanging, those banners of
death along the walls. I could not tell you, but there, outside,
the hinds hid & the hounds hung their heads, & it was in the room
above the inn, the raucous calamity of the inn, there by the bed,
She stood naked, clothed only in the knowledge of herself,
knowing the spider hanging in the corner between the raw beams
& the armoire was something as unofficial as the end—& there,
naked, redolent with the flames of the fire, with those embers rendering
light like language . . . she was, herself, a moving myth, self-announced
as any emblem of a life unfolding upon the air, the light, though the book
that she opened, the only book she knew, remained flat as a world, its pages
made luminous by the mind.
XI. The Aurora of the Midnight Ink
Will you really walk from one edge of the city to the other
dressed only in illusion & shame? How can I urge you to turn back?
Selene, when we return, we return to the book. The book opens,
& the world unfolds into its latticework of hymns. It is the excruciating
alchemy by which the spirit lives. I will live there with you, in the hotel
of the spirit, where the sheets are changed daily. Every instinct for
darkness is countered by yet another instinct for the light. Stand with me,
as I stand beside you in my jacket from Verona, its deep slate blue of
the gentlemen on their passeggiata. Here, take my pen, the scarred Montblanc
or the old Parker 50—it’s your choice tonight—& write to me
in the script of the present, write to me about those long white petals of a
carpenter’s shavings uncurling from his plane; write to me & tell me how
the mind can require such certainty of the dark. Any unfolding is an
unfolding into light, that unlocked origami of the light—the light slowly
lining again those faces, those facets, of our yet unfolding story.
XII. Dark Aurora
What a beautiful letter you wrote to me. It was as ripe
as a planet, & as much to the point. It was filled I saw not
with revelations or expectations. It was a space that expanded
like space. All I could do was respond with the poor reflex of intellect,
which is to say the insufficiency of a hedgehog & the modest vocabulary
of a saint. Darkness, darkness. What unfolds folds out away from us.
If death has a form, it is the form of departure. If death has a form,
it is lit by darkness. Everything we’ve looked for all these years,
everything together we’ve called some necessity of invention, any
syllable & symbol, every penetrating & luminous or prodigious desire,
every carved line on every page has emptied into this flesh, this flash
of revelation, this form which is no memory, which is our dark, the form
of dark, & darkness in its final form.