Out of Netherland

Out of Netherland

 

                              Days are like countries

                                                                     Old Arabic Proverb

                                   

1

 

Swaddled in space, slung between the seconds,

Above the ticking trace of an abyss,

Hours in abeyance, entrances, echoes,

Days are repeated, months simply forgotten.

Seeing a year stretched into shape, the number three

Dissolve, the numbers one and two look shaken,

Seeing the tearful parting, hear the cries escaping,    

As darkness takes them to another place,

Before the coal eyes of the coldest man,

To a distance counted in years, not yards.

Cold for the snow man, in the eternal

Silence of this nether land, where across

A vast vista of time and space a light

Appears, shines for a moment, and is gone.

11

 

 

Here in this unbound space of blur and torpor,
Nursed, as it were, in the last of hollows,
Something of darkness moves in the darkness.
Now that the sun has gone, the dials have ceased
To cast a shadow and to tell the time.
Remember the numbers from one to twelve
And the wide zero of the white clock face,
The nullity hidden but always there
In the days and nights when time would run out,
Before this inscrutable endlessness,
And the voices raised and the questions asked,
'But out from what, and from whom, and from where?'
This before and after a time, perhaps.
Memories are the tokens of our loss.

               

 

111

                     

 

A table and a bowl of water here,

The table gone, the table’s legs still stand,

The legs still stand but not the bowl of water:

The lies of old eyes and old habits for

Inside, outside, a black immensity,

As far as the mind can stretch, and no further.

Take solace in the little words, the bonds,

The strings that hold the dark inflatables,

Before they too break free from their fetters,

Up, and over, and under, and away,

While the body tumbles and stumbles out

Into the freakish, black immensity of space,

To the furthest reaches, breaking surfaces,

Breaking to the last of the low, and beyond.

                  

 

1V

 

 

A hand extends through space, finger after
Finger ricocheting. The moons of the nails
Fall in a quarter of grain-sized planets.
How mysteriously their shadows haunt
The surfaces, and how through the silver
Shimmer of mercurial liquids shoals
Of fish-bird glide and splinter. Their clear quartz
Glimmers; they enlarge with the momentum
Of something seen becoming a prism,
Measuring the distance between here and now.
More mysteriously, across the vast
Hollows and distances, stands a stranger
Sight, out of reach, and beyond reach

In this cradle of feathers and extinction.

 

  

  V

 

 

Here, the world is enough, the trees above

Are enough, all of this reality

Is contingent, and enough, for there is

A ration of rain, a day, and a life.

See in a blaze, a glory of white light,

The illuminated, and everything
As it is, before the light and the heat
Fade, and before darkness descends.

Listen, now, for the howling of anguished stars,

Immeasurably far, and near, and wonder

At an unreal cosmos of blues and greens,

Existing, and ceasing to exist

For always, in an instant, extinguished,

Before the seismic silence of this place.