A Thought in the Dark

A Thought in the Dark

Except in idea, perfection is as wild

as light; there is no hand laid on it.

But the house is a shambles

unless the vision of its perfection

            upholds it like stone.

More probable: the ideal

            of its destruction:

cloud of fire prefiguring

            its disappearance.

What value there is

                           is assumed…

                                   

                                    Wendell Berry

                                    The Design of a House

Thought is a colony of alternative

lives pushing the dirt into and out of

where?

Where, with solid on all sides, does it go

when the ant pushes like the worm who goes

open-mouthed

into the grave weight and eat just enough

to squeeze through and leave what they’ve

eaten

transformed?  They should be knighted

just for their effort; it’s valiant yearning isn't it

that’s thrust

into the groping and blind fruitroot, to give it

the ride of its very life and heave it up into

the light?

All these colonies, in all these chambered

secrets and seeds we squirreled away

to save

or, more likely, regret, or more likely still 

erect a pedestal and plinth too to

ease the bust 

of cooling, shaped, soon gold gilded coal 

black thought down to the center of it

and from then on,

or from time to time, come to worship there

or dust it off just to recall its value on the name plate,

cover it in shame, 

maybe, with a wig if time’s made it

hairline thin and under- the- chin heavy.  There

are times

the worshiped thing seems fine as butterfly

dust, that stuff that rubs up when you touch it,

crumbles

                     

even though your breath’s held, under your nose,

close, slow.

And those times the old worshiped notion seems less

solid, as though not stone at all but temperate clay

animate,

on it’s own going where requirement takes it right

on the chin, the cleft then in the cheek, the socket,

all those orbs:

the nose, the open (though slow)mouth—

when it turns its face in just enough water

and mud.  See:

a whole new day at the wheel: when sitting down

in a well-lit room means tearing the shit out of it

and rolling

it all out flat again and starting fresh, starting

new.  The thought you've honored and idoled

for all

these years has come undone.  The trouble,

you see now,  isn’t in the clay.  It’s in the faith

of your own

two making hands.  It’s in the thin arteries come down

from the brain in the blood.  What gets through

these days

is hoary with age..  It takes its time.  Lost faith means

ignoring  time, believing you don’t have it. 

Ha!  Time!

It’s all you have really, or the labor

you do in it.  Too late to make new now?  

Listen: Ageless as

it is, God made shapes out of the tone

of time.   Whatever’s spoke to your own 

formless lump

it becomes.  Hold out your hand.  The small ball

of river-bottom becomes the throb your life is 

built on.  

See thought curled humble on your life-line, 

between the heart and the arc?  Shape it 

with your eyes 

closed, hear it, hug it, open your wordless 

mouth to it.  Smell it live?  Come, 

take it into you, 

your new, Phew! (after being

so, so old) wonderful thought!