Radiance
. . . each time a human
being’s desire-energy leaves his body,
and goes out into the hills or forest, the desire-energy
whispers to the ear as it leaves: “You know, one day you’ll die.”
Robert Bly
News
of the Universe
To this
undulant end of land,
washed into
drumming caves below me by the sea,
I come to
watch the sun leave.
The ebbing
light makes all around me swell
with colors
of parting intensity:
the purple
asters glow like sea urchins;
the stems of
the faded thrifts seem to bleed.
The pelicans,
seagulls, and terns are not moved
as I am to a
certain lovely sadness in this hour—
they swoop
and glide and feed.
I think of
what Bly wrote in his book
on poems of
twofold consciousness.
I like where
he says the whispered words are good
(even if the
message makes you mourn)
because they
mean a certain consciousness in nature
has connected
with the same awareness awake in you—
though I’ve
never heard those words whispered to me
in moments of
profound beauty.
My melancholy
is born, I believe,
from my inability
to dissolve completely and become
the
indescribable radiance of this beauty.
