The Golden Mean

If you must carry fire, carry it in

your heart – somewhere sheltered but hidden,

polished by hands that once loved it.

The lining may be scorched and blackened

but only you must ever know this.

That easy hush you sometimes hear at night

as the darkness stirs in you, is not

the accustomed ache of blood, but a flame

shivering against the wind –

a meagre flame seeded long before you were born

which you have always known must be kept

burning forever, and offered to no one.

Let's head for a place, neighbouring and impossible,

that city neither of us has ever found;

it swithers somewhere between elsewhere

and here, anchored to the leeward dusk

fettered in cloud.

Look how it flourishes in decline –

no buttresses, no walls, no astragals,

only those luminous avenues of weather

gathering the cluttered light like window glass,

all furnished in the traceries of wind and rain.

When I overheard my father say

it was his favourite drink, I closed my eyes

and imagined his body filled with a helpless light.

Years later, I watched him pour out

the disappointing truth, but still couldn't let

that image go: he's trailing home from the pub

singing against the dark, and each step

he steps, each breath he breathes, each note he sings

turns somehow into light and light and light.

Don't grumble if this window grants

you only what you see in it.

If you must have light, step out into the world.

If you need shadow, step out into the light.

For once, there is no weight in detail. Who cares

if that's an oily handprint, a belaboured

field or far-off hills? The dirt stain of uncertainty

is all that matters. It fills the room

with neither light nor dark, but the promise

of meaning, which, in itself, means nothing

though it's what you came here for.

Picked flowers on a rug are dangerous

beyond reason. Their mouths hang

empty of pollen or scent. Such a clamour

of petals, each cut throat challenges

the room, renders it uninhabitable.

A shout, a condemnation, a curse, a denial.

What use is Spring to us now? What purpose

a room charged with such desperate light?

Even as we abandon it, their small voices

will follow us, their bitter faces gape.

Each dusk is the final dusk. Late mists

forget themselves above the lake.

A crowd of hemlock, shoulder-close and motherly

whispers as its own reflection drowns.

Somewhere not here, a loon calls

out the word for darkness twice,

then turns into the silence and its song.

I kneel where the water frays, and from my hands

build the cracked prayer of a cup.

Let me drink once more; just a little –

one mouthful, one sip would be enough.

Just this time let my hands not leak.

Let them be brimming when I raise them

to my lips, like this.

If I were given the choice,

I would become that bird Noah

first sent out to gauge the Flood.

But I would never come back.

I would never come back because

I would find another just like me

and the two of us, casting ourselves

for shadows, would sweep on like a thought

and its answer over depths and shallows

and never rest until the last waves

had unfurled, beating our wings

against the absence of the world.

Their ten-a-penny cunts bob in formalin;

the lips slackened, fading to olive drab.

I imagine them weary of being mouthed,

pickled on tedium, flaccid and tired.

They reek of estuary dirt; a tang

of sediment and brackish wine.

Lord, let their valves be opened to me;

let all things preserved be consumed

all but that single grain of sand

gritting between the teeth; flinty, neglected,

enduring as regret, reminding me of you.

If you ever decide you want to find God

look for him in a ploughed field, not high

overhead, in the drift of the distant weather.

And if you ask me how you should pray

to a buried God, I would say press

your lips into the earth, weight your voice

with the silence of earth and root and seed

and pray that all your prayers may be stones.

This loophole where the light lets in,

and my own breath leaks through my hands,

has damned my words to words or less.

That shim of air is God, of course,

who made us all, and all but whole

then set the wind against the world.

Like a gutting knife lost overboard,

or a tin flag hoisted against the gloom,

or a lime-white flame lit in the heart

of nowhere, the coalfish waits.

He's watching for us. How I wish he had

been named for the perfect

darkness gathered in his eye –

that bead of obsidian set in mother-of-pearl

so perfect it could hold the world.

A tin flag. A white lamp burning

in the founds of the sea.

The gutting knife's quick flame.

All that awful mess still lies ahead of him of course:

the silly posturing and bombast, those terrifying

stylish uniforms, the sticky end. For the time being

he's sitting by his mother now her illness has finished

its work. The sickroom carpet ankle-deep in his mediocre

sketches of her, endlessly rehearsing every incidence

of light – all those angles and shadows suffering worked

into her, as if somehow one loss might be lost in many

versions of itself. The traffic dims to a respectful hush.

Echoes skitter in the stairwell, then the impatience of a single

knock. Yes. The time has come to put the pencil down.

From this day forward, the only pages will be blank pages.