I Am Haunted by Numberless Islands

I am haunted by numberless islands.(1) It might have been the lighthouse

spark. When it comes landscapes listen, shadows hold their breath.(2)

When it goes it’s like the distance on the look of death, a seeing

that sees without seeing.(3) There is no change in life at death.(4) The face

of life is death—no scar but internal difference where the meanings are.(5)

Here the without is more within than the innermost beyond

all time and occasion.(6) Drink the dregs of the cup of trembling

and wring them out.(7) My illness has no form and is invisible.(8)

Awaken in our hearts a sadness that may not die. We tire

of the flame of the meteor before it can fade and flee.(9)

Art thou not it that has cut Rahab and wounded the dragon?

and dried the sea for the ransomed to pass over?(10) Angels softly peer

almost as if they care.(11) Around every profound spirit a mask

is growing continually.(12) Were nothingness thought of apart from its mask

it would become an idea. There’s a place within God where God

is not God himself. God’s being God entails having made himself empty.(13)

The eye with which I see God is the eye with which God sees me—

the uncreated I am. I flee from God for the sake of God.(14)

On the outer verge of your long seclusion peopling the world

with ugly shapes everything appears to lose its substance the instant

one grapples with it. So it will be with what you think so terrible.(15)

Peace comes dropping slow from the veils of the morning to where the cricket

sings. I hear lake water lapping in the deep heart’s core. A climbing moon

upon an empty sky and all that lamentation of leaves could but compose

man’s image and his cry.(16) All of this is man’s imagery that God

has entered into.(17) Blind blind swans. Dream on the pillow of another’s skull

until you wake to dream.(18) The vairy hartshorn ether enough

to brace the sun and its full moon this dawning of upsparked flurries

from night’s fine moulage noumenal upon all things as if 

no longer the eye’s deposed apport but rather now in port 

iridic decomposed and discomported as stillicide 

from fanging gutters and beetled awnings notates via 

iset elision less notable than last night’s snowy 

redaction of rabbit blood and fur erasure. Retrenched take note

the notetake scrieve of worm script under bark on osteal bole

nearly readable beneath the sherbet light from the retable 

through which upwells of snow oriflamme. By noon by God

it’s so sunny it must have gotten colder still. Swans angel 

past like unpuzzled impossibilities. The poison 

berries of summer remain bright as cardinals like tiny 

icesheathed souls that die in spring having died long ago. The solstice

has been left. Soon the pull of February’s fineless light 

so blue it echoes as if from the caverns of the skull 

of the sun dulled and dislimn as a yellowy chad

among vastation’s finelessly blue magnificat. Certainly

it’s a sure bet the world will end. Though if that’s true it’s never

begun. A cosmic shutter drawn. Draw a cosmic shudder and feel utter

joy. What never was can never be annihilated. What has been

can never not have been so always is. A swan is both a swan

and an unpuzzled impossibility. You have seen 

the bottom drop out of everything and felt lost. You have known

it was the top blown off and that you are the fineless world.

FOOTNOTES:

1. W. B. Yeats

2. Emily Dickinson

3. Emily Dickinson, Keiji Nishitani

4. Keiji Nishitani

5. Matsuo Bashō, Emily Dickinson

6. Keiji Nishitani

7. Isaiah

8. Vimalakīrti

9. W. B. Yeats

10. Isaiah

11. Emily Dickinson

12. Friedrich Nietzsche

13. Keiji Nishitani

14. Meister Eckhart

15. Nathaniel Hawthorne

16. W. B. Yeats

17. David Eugene Edwards

18. Matsuo Bashō