Light in Dark Objects

Brian Henderson
From:   Light in Dark Objects. Ekstasis Editions, 2000.

Once I saw the ghost of a deer flowing
across the road in the dry gaze of headlights.
It was glowing with something strong
and it left a trail of itself.

A lump of coal jumps up from the roadside
and tears a hole in the mirage of the
world with the glint of crow wings,
and this makes you think twice.

What we see by is crushed out of us
and begins to flow with a viscous clarity
toward another, dense with passion.
And so about this inevitability I think,
How improbable we are, how remarkable.
A line of trees on the other side of the mind.
I think, This is the light that's stored in dark objects,
in ink, diffused through the mind of stone, sleeping
in the heart of wood, or in the folds of
black crepe that is the night sky.
If water takes the shape of what it's poured into,
light shapes what it burns in like memory.

The air holds just enough of it nearly to shine,
your arms around my neck, legs my waist,
water to throats, my feet rooted in the soft dark
silt of the lake floor. Without moving,
we are moved, we are what
the lake is thinking, reeds and waterlilies, here
so fiercely we could be anywhere,
on the bed, in the complete dark
your tongue licking stars out of me.


                                                                            4 January, 2000

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Brian Henderson's works copyright © to the author.