(for
Su Bainbridge and to all beautiful Shaktis everywhere)
You are, you
generate and you radiate out a light so bright I cannot look. It effervesces
in your eyes
and sparkles in your hair. It is the
joy that spills from your mouth:
it is so huge,
you cannot name it or contain it.
Your heart
commands the arts and alchemy of transubstantiation: you clap your hands
and that which
was dull, muted and monochrome bursts into shimmering, vibrant colour.
Pigeons fly
swooping from their pigeonholes.
Chess-pieces paint out their squares
and put on
their party clothes.
Even grumpy
kings and stand-offish queens are charmed by your joy.
You make every
round peg feel itself safe and snug in a round hole.
Your light flows as a
sea to every river, to every tributary; and reaches even me.
Beside you grey shadows
retreat to the grey cupboard where they belong.
Your light infects
me. I absorb it in osmosis: shed rotten
layers and cast off
ancient impositions.
You are light; and your
light is simple and bright. It’s
clarity, concise: transcending
the muddy convolutions
of intellect. Your wisdom is being,
simply being.
There are degrees of
light and degrees of shadow; and each is a truth, irrefutable, unto
itself.
The truth you have
chosen, the truth that chose you, the truth I now drink
is clear, sharp and
painfully beautiful.
From this vantage point,
I see what you see: I see beyond the cities, beyond the clouds,
beyond the sky; and
below me a zen landscape of mountains and sea, a calligrapher’s tree
burning bright with
vertigo.
I am dizzy with the
knowledge that there can be no more fear of falling.
You are light. You are love. You are everything that is easily mocked.
The vocabulary of your
goodness is without sophistry. There is
no ironic post-modernist,
no educated fool, no
surgeon of cool who can cauterise or analyse what simply is.
They may have an army of
lexicographers and have built a causeway of shifting shadow -
they may have
constructed, in the moon’s thin glare, a mythology of undeniable intricacy -
they may dazzle with
their erudition, but you know and I know and they know,
they are without
conviction.
Their darkness, their
ennui, their desolation is as familiar to me as you are strange and new.
I want to be possessed
by you.
I want to ride over this
fear of descent into platitude, of speaking my light in idiot Christian
tongues.
I ask myself can I let go
and just be?
I know the blood-red
hard wood: it has the familiarity of skin; it is as known to me as these veins,
this flesh, this brittle
pale bone.
I have torn myself with
chainsaws, chisels gouges, rasps. I
have smoothed my mouth
with fine grade
sandpaper and cast a perfect web of poetry and deceit.
I apprenticed myself and
am now master, but I ask, can I let go of such conceits?
It has been a long
mountain track, littered with numerous ragged, unrealised abortions:
each with the attendant
pain of childbirth. I have the scars,
look! But, now, here,
I can turn out carvings
of perplexing, savage complexity; smooth to the touch;
slick as machined metal;
hard, erotic, beautiful - beautiful in the limitless darkness.
I am frightened by this
dexterity: my unthinking dedication to the glorification
of shadows and skin.
You are light; and in
your light, my shadows are but dismal, futile mutterings.
The light in me has
woken from a yawning, protracted sleep; and I am shocked upon waking,
to find my temples - for
all the years and careful craft -
standing stark, glittering and glorious,
in a war-zone of craters
and ash.
You are light. Your truth has overwhelmed me. The darkness
no longer hypnotises,
for all its contrivance
and trickery. Its mystery, its
fine-fingered ornamentation,
has dissipated into the
commonplace and ordinary. It may master
the thesaurus,
but it no longer masters
me.
You, my love: I enter
into your light, in humility. I have no
maps, few words
and just the basic tools
of a small child. Speechless and
blundering, with my sophistry in ashes,
I anticipate a happiness
that surpasses understanding.
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