locked into / out of [self-portrait]

All right, Go ahead!
What's in a name?
I guess I'll be locked into
As much as I'm locked out of!

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay ~

A Work Of Artifice [self-portrait]

The bonsai tree
in the attractive pot
could have grown eighty feet tall
on the side of a mountain
till split by lightning.
But a gardener
carefully pruned it.
It is nine inches high.
Every day as he
whittles back the branches
the gardener croons,
It is your nature
to be small and cozy,
domestic and weak;
how lucky, little tree,
to have a pot to grow in.
With living creatures
one must begin very early
to dwarf their growth:
the bound feet,
the crippled brain,
the hair in curlers,
the hands you
love to touch.

~ Marge Piercy ~

think like a tree

Soak up the sun
Affirm life's magic
Be graceful in the wind
Stand tall after a storm
Feel refreshed after it rains
Grow strong without notice
Be prepared for each season
Provide shelter to strangers
Hang tough through a cold spell
Emerge renewed at the first signs of spring
Stay deeply rooted while reaching for the sky
Be still long enough to
hear your own leaves rustling.

~ Karen I. Shragg ~

tenho fases

Tenho fases, como a lua.
Fases de andar escondida,
fases de vir para a rua...
Perdição da minha vida!
Perdição da vida minha!
Tenho fases de ser tua,
tenho outras de ser sozinha.

Fases que vão e que vem,
no secreto calendário
que um astrólogo arbitrário
inventou para meu uso.

E roda a melancolia
seu interminável fuso!

Não me encontro com ninguém
(tenho fases, como a lua...)
No dia de alguém ser meu
não é dia de eu ser sua...
E, quando chega esse dia,
o outro desapareceu...

Aquilo que ontem cantava
já não canta.
Morreu de uma flor na boca:
não do espinho na garganta.

~ Cecília Meireles ~

about dying

I'm not going to beg you pardon
(for all that)
neither for my way of surviving
nor for the fact that I don't fear death.

I'm not going to tell you
(anything)
neither about my fear of dying
nor about the way I do
(die).

I’m not going to let you see
(ever)
neither the wounds you caused
nor the bandages I’m creating
(every minute of your absence).

I’m not going to break
(again)
neither the silence
nor into pieces.

I’m going to lose
(unrecoverable)
either my words
or my voice.
And if you ever knew
(more than this)
my words are my voice is my life
you should know
(tacitly)
that I’m going to die.

~ Abra ~

killing the love [self-portrait]

I am the love killer,
I am murdering the music we thought so special,
that blazed between us, over and over.
I am murdering me, where I kneeled at your kiss.
I am pushing knives through the hands
that created two into one.
Our hands do not bleed at this,
they lie still in their dishonor.
I am taking the boats of our beds
and swamping them, letting them cough on the sea
and choke on it and go down into nothing.
I am stuffing your mouth with your
promises and watching
you vomit them out upon my face.
The Camp we directed?
I have gassed the campers.

Now I am alone with the dead,
flying off bridges,
hurling myself like a beer can into the wastebasket.
I am flying like a single red rose,
leaving a jet stream
of solitude
and yet I feel nothing,
though I fly and hurl,
my insides are empty
and my face is as blank as a wall.

Shall I call the funeral director?
He could put our two bodies into one pink casket,
those bodies from before,
and someone might send flowers,
and someone might come to mourn
and it would be in the obits,
and people would know that something died,
is no more, speaks no more, won't even
drive a car again and all of that.

When a life is over,
the one you were living for,
where do you go?

I'll work nights.
I'll dance in the city.
I'll wear red for a burning.
I'll look at the Charles very carefully,
weraing its long legs of neon.
And the cars will go by.
The cars will go by.
And there'll be no scream
from the lady in the red dress
dancing on her own Ellis Island,
who turns in circles,
dancing alone
as the cars go by.

~ Anne Sexton ~

underneath [self-portrait]

Up, up you go, you must be introduced.

You must learn belonging to (no-one)

Drenched in the white veil (day)

The circle of minutes pushed gleaming onto your finger.

Gaps pocking the brightness where you try to see
in.

Missing: corners, fields,

completeness: holes growing in it where the eye looks hardest.

Below, his chest, a sacred weightless place

and the small weight of your open hand on it.

And these legs, look, still yours, after all you've done with them.

Explain the six missing seeds.

Explain muzzled.

Explain tongue breaks thin fire in eyes.


Learn what the great garden-(up, up you go)-exteriority,
exhales:

the green never-the-less the green who-did-you-say-you-are

and how it seems to stare all the time, that green,


until night blinds it temporarily.

What is it searching for all the leaves turning towards you.

Breath the emptiest of the freedoms.

When will they notice the hole in your head (they won't).

When will they feel for the hole in your chest
(never).

Up, go. Let being-seen drift over you again, sticky kindness.

Those wet strangely unstill eyes filling their heads-


thinking or sight?-

all waiting for the true story-

your heart, beating its little song: explain. . .

Explain requited

Explain indeed the blood of your lives I will require

explain the strange weight of meanwhile

and there exists another death in regards to which

we are not immortal

variegated dappled spangled intricately wrought

complicated obstruse subtle devious

scintillating with change and ambiguity

~ Jorie Graham ~

out of my head

Get out of my walled infinity
Of the star circle round my heart
Of my mouthful of sun

Get out of the cosmic sea of my blood
Of my flow of my ebb
Get out of my stranded silence

Get out I said get out

Get out of my living abyss
Of the bare father-tree within me

Get out how long must I cry get out

Get out of my bursting head
Get out just get out

~ Vasko Popa ~

who knows

Who says that all must vanish?
Who knows, perhaps the flight
of the bird you wound remains,
and perhaps flowers survive
caresses in us, in their ground.

[...]

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

sense of something coming

I am like a flag in the center of open space.
I sense ahead the wind which is coming, and must live
it through.
while the things of the world still do not move:
the doors still close softly, and the chimneys are full
of silence,
the windows do not rattle yet, and the dust still lies down.

I already know the storm, and I am troubled as the sea.
I leap out, and fall back,
and throw myself out, and am absolutely alone
in the great storm.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

madness and a bit of hope

8.
what is madness
the smell of orchids stronger than the smell of blood
how many pieces of glass embedded in my feet
i mustn't stop to look

no, i mustn't stop to look
i want these flowers
i want this sweet touch
risking life for beauty

risking sanity for love
a bit of hope covering my wounds
a bit of hope covering my wounds

~ Safiya Henderson-Holmes ~

voices

1.
what is madness
is it an outbreak of dawn, a wild blood sun
killing this night
this touch less night

it is the wale of a full moon
over the breast of a homeless mother
or the shriek of stars
witnessing murder

to risk living
you encounter madness
broad based and picking its teeth
the insane sigh
and pull you to their chest

sometimes, you must stop breathing
to leave them
and leaving the insane
is again, madness

a run towards orchids
blooming in a field of broken glass
a terrain too dangerous to walk over
and running doesn't avoid the danger

but then, this is
the risk of living
the blood letting among flowers

2.
what is madness
a cacophony of voices
in our armpits
hurling us into stillness
banging our heads with memory

i remember when small
the voices were crystals
easy to hold and pray to
at night they were bells
listening to the wind in my breath

when small
the voices taught me how
to ride my bike down steep hills
how to turn sharp corners

the voices made me
laugh at the dark
and the darkened places
kept the voices hidden

from pointing fingers
of mommy
she - wanted to know
who i was talking with
she wanted to know

why I sang even when
daddy was drunk
beyond a reason
being here

she wanted to know
what allowed me to sleep
the middle of her crying
and why i never awoke with tears of my own

the voices
I never told mommy about the voices
and how they whispered me
into dancing to the edge of everything

how they hummed
as i curtsied for the old ladies
and kissed the sunken cheeks
of old men

how at times they riddled me
to a windowsill, or a bridge
or a razor, or daddy's whiskey
but just for fun

just to see me dance to
and away from another edge
the voices are such testers
when small, i never thought of failing

3.
now, tapping
behind my ears awakening
too many pieces
the voices are rivalry

jarring, rampant
between my fingers
between my toes
i hear them

even as i run towards the orchids
i hear them
belittling my escape

4.
what is madness
a seagull impaled on a fence
a cat walking into a river
a baby sucking needles in the center of a room
rain beating holes into the eyes of a dead dog

when did the voices
become
so diseased and angry
and whose strength do they use
to carry us to such unfamiliar place

they can pull triggers
they can throw us off rooftops
they can split us into uneven halve
whose strength do they use

6.
a man i know
is fighting these mutant voices
he is scraping them from his walls
dragging them from under his bed

somehow they have read
his books and his mind
they quote his fears
hear them, whose strength do they use
hear them, whose strength do they use

they are charging up this man's back with swords
an army paranoid of his every blink
they bulge his eyes
see them, whose strength do they use

the voices are taking this man's dark brown skin
and stretching it across his memory .
he stands before himself like a crucifix
his palms showing the lines of too much and too many

a mother, two fathers, three brothers,
two sisters, two daughters, one son, two wives,
three college degrees, no job
i hear this man shouting at the voices

a cacophony of his own
a litany of statistics
of dark brown women and men
the number on ships

the number killed by whips
the number in chains,
the number swung from ropes
the numbers, every number heavy in his throat
a malignant phlegm

i've seen this man try
and inch his skin away from the voices
seen him count the spots of light
left by other dark skins

and carry this number as if a
candle to his brain
illuminating the horrors
and when he speaks

it is of the women and men
ripped open in front of their mothers
it is of the fathers crippled by
the weight of silence

this man's tongue is thick
with the silence of dark brown fathers
and the voices dare him to speak
dare him to dare

these voices jealous
of this man's 46 unbending years
threaten him with death at any corner
threaten him with the lethal stare of a stranger

7.
what is madness
hot tar cooling on dark brown skin
pickled genitals in a jar

and when we run from these voices
we wish for the wings of eagles, for the grasp of hawks
a caravan of warriors in our sweat
our eyes screaming madness be still

not another dark brown body
will it take, not another
will it take to its rage ridden room
not another foot, tooth, or strand

of tightly coiled hair
this man and i poised against our walls
ready for attack
see us, our skin, our only weapon

8.
what is madness
the smell of orchids stronger than the smell of blood
how many pieces of glass embedded in my feet
i mustn't stop to look

no, i mustn't stop to look
i want these flowers
i want this sweet touch
risking life for beauty

risking sanity for love
a bit of hope covering my wounds
a bit of hope covering my wounds

~ Safiya Henderson-Holmes ~

she [all the same]

it is all blood and breaking,
blood and breaking, the thing
drops out of its box squalling
into the light. they are both squalling,
animal and cage. her bars lie wet, open
and empty and she has made herself again
out of flesh out of dictionaries,
she is always emptying and it is all
the same wound the same blood the same breaking.

~ Lucille Clifton ~

alter ego #2

she looks at the world from
another side of the window

her essence a sandy presence
before an astral stage curtain

elevator hallucinations
my mind caught
between piped ideas and
tea cloud beams

my heart waiting
with anticipation, struggling
with her nightmares

hour of solitary in meditation

I have looked into antiquity
to find her name waited for
her to show her self to me,

to disclose where I can find
her prediction, looking to
understand what is it that has
brought her here, what makes me
want to give my soul to her cause

I have told her I would
follow her wherever
she desires, to be with her,
our spirits as one
searching heavens eventide

looking to find the next
dimension, the meaning behind
death, before it’s too late

our souls binned outside life’s prisms,
her ghost shadow, waiting for me to
find the consequence of our purgatory

she looks at the world from
another side of the window

waiting for my resolve her love
comforting my soul, I would
destroy your world to free her

~ Joseph Mayo Wristen ~

imagining [soliloquizing]

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Key sentence:

Imagining something is better than remembering something.

~ John Irwing ~

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

1

You scream, waking from a nightmare.

When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us. I think
you think
I will never die, I think I exude
to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.

2

I have heard you tell
the sun, don't go down, I have stood by
as you told the flower, don't grow old,
don't die. Little Maud,

I would blow the flame out of your silver cup,
I would suck the rot from your fingernail,
I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light,
I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones,
I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body,
I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood,
I would let nothing of you go, ever,

until washerwomen
feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands,
and hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades,
and rats walk away from the cultures of the plague,
and iron twists weapons toward the true north,
and grease refuses to slide in the machinery of progress,
and men feel as free on earth as fleas on the bodies of men,
and lovers no longer whisper to the presence beside them in the
dark, O corpse-to-be...

And yet perhaps this is the reason you cry,
this the nightmare you wake screaming from:
being forever
in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.

3

In a restaurant once, everyone
quietly eating, you clambered up
on my lap: to all
the mouthfuls rising toward
all the mouths, at the top of your voice
you cried
your one word, caca! caca! caca!
and each spoonful
stopped, a moment, in midair, in its withering
steam.

Yes,
you cling because
I, like you, only sooner
than you, will go down
the path of vanished alphabets,
the roadlessness
to the other side of the darkness,

your arms
like the shoes left behind,
like the adjectives in the halting speech
of old men,
which once could call up the lost nouns.

4

And you yourself,
some impossible Tuesday
in the year Two Thousand and Nine, will walk out
among the black stones
of the field, in the rain,

and the stones saying
over their one word, ci-gît, ci-gît, ci-gît,

and the raindrops
hitting you on the fontanel
over and over, and you standing there
unable to let them in.

5

If one day it happens
you find yourself with someone you love
in a café at one end
of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar
where white wine stands in upward opening glasses,

and if you commit then, as we did, the error
of thinking,
one day all this will only be memory,

learn,
as you stand
at this end of the bridge which arcs,
from love, you think, into enduring love,
learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come – to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones. Kiss
the mouth
which tells you, here,
here is the world. This mouth. This laughter. These temple bones.

The still undanced cadence of vanishing.

6

In the light the moon
sends back, I can see in your eyes

the hand that waved once
in my father's eyes, a tiny kite
wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:

and the angel
of all mortal things lets go the string.

7

Back you go, into your crib.

The last blackbird lights up his gold wings: farewell.
Your eyes close inside your head,
in sleep. Already
in your dreams the hours begin to sing.

Little sleep's-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,
when I come back
we will go out together,
we will walk out together among
the ten thousand things,
each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages
of dying is love.

~ Galway Kinnell ~

locked into [out of]

All right,
Go ahead!
What's in a name?
I guess I'll be locked into
As much as I'm locked out of!

~ Edna St. Vincent Millay ~

silence [singing]

Though the air is full of singing
my head is loud
with the labor of words.

Though the season is rich
with fruit, my tongue
hungers for the sweet of speech.

Though the beech is golden
I cannot stand beside it
mute, but must say

"It is golden," while the leaves
stir and fall with a sound
that is not a name.

It is in the silence
that my hope is, and my aim.
A song whose lines

I cannot make or sing
sounds men's silence
like a root. Let me say

and not mourn: the world
lives in the death of speech
and sings there.

~ Wendell Berry ~

wingbeats

O hour of my muse: why do you leave me,
Wounding me by the wingbeats of your flight?
Alone: what shall I use my mouth to utter?

How shall I pass my days? And how my nights?

I have no one to love. I have no home.
There is no center to sustain my life.
All things to which I give myself grow rich
and leave me spent, impoverished, alone.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

painting emotions [wind]

what if a much of a which of a wind
gives the truth to summer's lie;
bloodies with dizzying leaves the sun
and yanks immortal stars awry?
Blow king to beggar and queen to seem
(blow friend to fiend: blow space to time)
-when skies are hanged and oceans drowned,
the single secret will still be man

what if a keen of a lean wind flays
screaming hills with sleet and snow:
strangles valleys by ropes of things
and stifles forests in white ago?
Blow hope to terror; blow seeing to blind
(blow pity to envy and soul to mind)
-whose hearts are mountains, roots are trees,
it's they shall cry hello to the spring

what if a dawn of a doom of a dream
bites this universe in two,
peels forever out of his grave
and sprinkles nowhere with me and you?
Blow soon to never and never to twice
(blow life to isn't: blow death towas)
-all nothing's only our hugest home;
the most who die, the more we live.

~ e. e. cummings ~

lost [reminiscence]

It would be good to give much thought, before
you try to find words for something so lost,
for those long childhood afternoons you knew
that vanished so completely – and why?

We're still reminded – : sometimes by a rain,
but we can no longer say what it means;
life was never again so filled with meeting,
with reunion and with passing on

as back then, when nothing happened to us
except what happens to things and creatures:
we lived their world as something human,
and became filled to the brim with figures.

And became as lonely as a sheperd
and as overburdened by vast distances,
and summoned and stirred as from far away,
and slowly, like a long new thread,
introduced into that picture-sequence
where now having to go on bewilders us.

~ Rainer Maria Rilke ~

alter ego #1

Will I be able to hide you
From your face in mine

~ Vasko Popa ~

tell me [again]

If hands could free you, heart,
Where would you fly?

~ Philip Larkin ~

I know [and I see]

Close-mouthed you sat five thousand years and never
let out a whisper.
Processions came by, marchers, asking questions you
answered with grey eyes never blinking, shut lips
never talking.
Not one croak of anything you know has come from your
cat crouch of ages.
I am one of those who know all you know and I keep my
questions: I know the answers you hold.

~ Carl Sandburg ~

into a name

she
stolen from my bone
is it any wonder
i hunger to tunnel back
inside desperate
to reconnect the rib and clay
and to be whole again

some need is in me
struggling to roar through my
mouth into a name
this creation is so fierce
i would rather have been born

~ Lucille Clifton ~

breath

Tree, gather up my thoughts
like the clouds in your branches.
Draw up my soul
like the waters in your root.

In the arteries of your trunk
bring me together.
Through your leaves
breathe out the sky.

~ Daniel Beaudry ~

holy love flame

You call me an angel of love and of light,
A being of goodness and heavenly fire,
Sent out from God’s kingdom to guide you aright,
In paths where your spirits may mount and aspire.
You say that I glow like a star on its course,
Like a ray from the alter, a spark from the source.

Now list to my answer; let all the world hear it;
I speak unafraid what I know to be true:
A pure, faithful love is the creative spirit
Which makes women angels! I live in but you.
We are bound soul to soul by life’s holiest laws;
If I am an angel – why, you are the cause.

As my ship skims the sea, I look up from the deck.
Fair, firm at the wheel shines Love’s beautiful form,
And shall I curse the barque that last night went to wreck,
By the Pilot abandoned to darkness and storm?
My craft is no stauncher, she too had been lost –
Had the wheelman deserted, or slept at his post.

I laid down the wealth of my soul at your feet
(Some woman does this for some man every day) .
No desperate creature who walks in the street,
Has a wickeder heart that I might have, I say,
Had you wantonly misused the treasures you woon,
As so many men with heart riches have done.

This flame from God’s altar, this holy love flame,
That burns like sweet incense for ever for you,
Might now be a wild conflagration of shame,
Had you tortured my heart, or been base or untrue.
For angels and devils are cast in one mould,
Till love guides them upward, or downward, I hold.

I tell you the women who make fervent wives
And sweet tender mothers, had Fate been less fair,
Are the women who might have abandoned their lives
To the madness that springs from and ends in despair.
As the fire on the hearth which sheds brightness around,
Neglected, may level the walls to the ground.

The world makes grave errors in judging these things,
Great good and great evil are born in one breast.
Love horns us and hoofs us – or gives us our wings,
And the best could be worst, as the worst could be best.
You must thank your own worth for what I grew to be,
For the demon lurked under the angel in me.

~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox ~

i know

Close-mouthed you sat five thousand years and never
let out a whisper.
Processions came by, marchers, asking questions you
answered with grey eyes never blinking, shut lips
never talking.
Not one croak of anything you know has come from your
cat crouch of ages.
I am one of those who know all you know and I keep my
questions: I know the answers you hold.

~ Carl Sandburg ~

tell me

If hands could free you, heart,
Where would you fly?

~ Philip Larkin ~

Life has not broken it

It will not change now
After so many years;
Life has not broken it
With parting or tears;
Death will not alter it,
It will live on
In all my songs for you
When I am gone.

~ Sara Teasdale ~

without a whisper

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I had a dream... last night... I saw your face... all dark and golden...
elusive, fleeting... reminiscent of an imperishable longing... enclosed
in my speechlessness.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Behold me, in my chiffon, gauze, and tinsel,
Flitting out of the shadow into the spotlight,
And into the shadow again, without a whisper! —
Firefly's my name, I am evanescent.

Firefly's your name. You are evanescent.
But I follow you as remorselessly as darkness,
And shut you in and enclose you, at last, and always,
Till you are lost, — as a voice is lost in silence.

Till I am lost, as a voice is lost in silence. . .
Are you the one who would close so cool about me?
My fire sheds into and through you and beyond you:
How can your fingers hold me? I am elusive.

How can my fingers hold you? You are elusive?
Yes, you are flame, but I surround and love you,
Always extend beyond you, cool, eternal,
To take you into my heart's great void of silence.

You shut me into your heart's great void of silence. . .
O sweet and soothing end for a life of whirling!
Now I am still, whose life was mazed with motion.
Now I sink into you, for love of sleep.

~ Conrad Aiken ~

loving leaves

On me to rest, my bird, my bird:
The swaying branches of my heart
Are blown by every wind toward
The home whereto their wings depart.

Build not your nest, my bird, on me;
I know no peace but ever sway:
O lovely bird, be free, be free,
On the wild music of the day.

But sometimes when your wings would rest,
And winds are laid on quiet eves:
Come, I will bear you breast to breast,
And lap you close with loving leaves.

~ George William Russell ~

On the other side of words

For his sake drifting away from the true
windlessness, torn sails the aftermath
of him: white canvas suffering too vaguely
from the beautiful agreeing with these arguments,
but far away: sought him, found him

not, distant from image, archetype, the typical
sublime’s encroachments, archaeology
of his innocence which is to be destroyed. Shaped,
shaping, shapes, and shape, the neverwhere
intact, the unearth disinterred. Hermes mi amor,

mi partida, mi pobreza: him my dark
of the moon, my mare nubium, oceanus
procellarum, whatever’s not shown there, a man
who wants to make him shadowless. I windward
into disbelief unmoored, drowned

splendors of my own speech. Then beauty with his hooks
and pulleys, block and tackle has his way. Him
just across the boundary of the sayable, tradutore,
traditore, willingly acceding to any formulation
on the other side of words, spoken, spoken of,

but never said: him always
the him, object of the hymns I wrote, subject
to song, so he can’t recognize himself, come down
to rescue his or mine, danger invites him, a popular
tune (taste of betrayal

on the humming tongue, the hearing ear,
but wrongly): my occupation or claim
on Argus-eyed blind night, trill, partial, whistling
untuned: this stubborn wind, his
mandolin. He knows I’d love.

~ Reginald Shepherd ~

the wishes of my heart

I was in the darkness;
I could not see my words
Nor the wishes of my heart.
Then suddenly there was a great light --

"Let me into the darkness again."

~ Stephen Crane ~

world within a world

With the face goes a mirror
As with the mind a world.
Likeness tells the doubting eye
That strangeness is not strange.
At an early hour and knowledge
Identity not yet familiar
Looks back upon itself from later,
And seems itself.

To-day seems now.
With reality-to-be goes time.
With the mind goes a world.
Wit the heart goes a weather.
With the face goes a mirror
As with the body a fear.
Young self goes staring to the wall
Where dumb futurity speaks calm,
And between then and then
Forebeing grows of age.

The mirror mixes with the eye.
Soon will it be the very eye.
Soon will the eye that was
The very mirror be.
Death, the final image, will shine
Transparently not otherwise
Than as the dark sun described
With such faint brightnesses.

~ Laura Riding Jackson ~