1

 

The story of the end, of the last word

of the end, when told, is a story that never ends.

We tell it and retell it—one word, then another

until it seems that no last word is possible,

that none would be bearable. Thus, when the hero

of the story says to himself, as to someone far away,

“Forgive them, for they know not what they do,”

we may feel that he is pleading for us, that we are

the secret life of the story and, as long as his plea

is not answered, we shall be spared. So the story

continues. So we continue. And the end, once more,

becomes the next, and the next after that.

 

2

 

There is an island in the dark, a dreamt-of place

where the muttering wind shifts over the white lawns

and riffles the leaves of trees, the high trees

that are streaked with gold and line the walkways there;

and those already arrived are happy to be the silken

remains of something they were but cannot recall;

they move to the sound of stars, which is also imagined,

but who cares about that; the polished columns they see

may be no more than shafts of sunlight, but for those

who live on and on in the radiance of their remains

this is of little importance. There is an island

in the dark and you will be there, I promise you,

you shall be with me in paradise, in the single season of being,

in the place of forever, you shall find yourself.

And there the leaves will turn and never fall, there the wind will sing

and be your voice as if for the first time.

 

3

 

Someday someone will write a story telling

among other things of a parting between mother

and son, of how she wandered off, of how he vanished

in air. But before that happens, it will describe

how their faces shone with a feeble light and how

the son was moved to say, “Woman, look at your son,”

then to a friend nearby, “Son, look at your mother.”

At which point the writer will put down his pen and

imagine that while those words were spoken

something else happened, something unusual like a

purpose revealed, a secret exchanged, a truth

to which they, the mother and son, would be bound,

but what it was no one would know. Not even the writer.

 

4

 

These are the days of spring when the sky is filled with

the odor of lilac, when darkness becomes desire,

and there is nothing that does not wish to be born;

days when the fate of the present is a breezy fullness,

when the world’s great gift for fiction gilds even

the dirt we walk on, and we feel we could live forever

while knowing of course that we can’t. Such is our plight.

The master of weather and everything else, if he wants,

can bring forth a dark of a different kind, one hidden

by darkness so deep it cannot be seen. No one escapes.

Not even the man who believed he was chosen to do so,

for when the dark came down he cried out, “Father, Father,

why have you forsaken me?” To which no answer came.

 

5

 

To be thirsty. To say, “I thirst.”

To close one’s eyes and see the giant world

that is born each time the eyes are closed.

To see one’s death. To see the darkening clouds

as the tragic cloth of a day of mourning. To be the one

mourned. To open the dictionary of the Beyond and discover

what one suspected, that the only word in it

is nothing. To try to open one’s eyes, but not to be

able to. To feel the mouth burn. To feel the sudden

presence of what,again and again, was not said.

To translate it and have it remain unsaid. To know

at last that nothing is more real than nothing.

 

6

 

“It is finished,” he said. You could hear him say it,

the words almost a whisper, then not even that,

but an echo so faint it seemed no longer to come

from him, but from elsewhere. This was his moment,

his final moment. “It is finished,” he said into a vastness

that led to an even greater vastness, and yet all of it

within him. He contained it all. That was the miracle,

to be both large and small in the same instant, to be

like us, but more so, then finally to give up the ghost,

which is what happened. And from the storm that swirled

in his wake a formal nakedness took shape, the truth

of disguise and the mask of belief were joined forever.

 

7

 

Back down these stairs to the same scene,

to the moon, the stars, the night wind. Hours pass

and only the harp off in the distance and the wind

moving through it. And soon the sun’s gray disk,

darkened by clouds, sailing above. And beyond,

as always, the sea of endless transparence, of utmost

calm, a place of constant beginning that has within it

what no eye has seen, what no ear has heard, what no hand

has touched, what has not arisen in the human heart.

To that place, to the keeper of that place, I commit myself.