Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Title poem from my book RADIANCE


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.

        


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