8/22/2006

The Window's Light

When we look in
from the dark,
the window's light
is cruel; when a body

becomes transparent
as leaf veins held
against a glowing sky
and struck by its beauty...

we sacrifice
our hidden
future.

Who shuts out
the cold by dying?
Who feeds the mind
with grains of night?

If our weight
becomes the same
as thunder, as infinite
as the shadowed hills,

if we look away
from suicidal stars,
the burning arc
of nature's will-

we come away
with nothing.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

This would be heartbreaking were not for this stanza

'Who shuts out
the cold by dying?
Who feeds the mind
with grains of night ' night being italicized adds a 'relief' to the line, relief in the sculputural sense, giving the line room to breath, as the intensity of what it does not say requires a break, a catharsis?

My 'crude' and hasty remarks are merely signs of my ..., speechlessness here... before the taut elegance of these lines . What memory haunts them!