Garnet Poems: An Anthology of Connecticut Poetry Since 1776

The Mythology of Dark and Light

96 gArnet poems The Mythology of Dark and Light the first version New England is a region of the heart where she has lived always, artist of Jahweh’s unnameable burden! The forest is cosmopolis. She wanders, a stranger to its cantabile of green, knowing no surprises, among beings who bear time as they must, showing forth their changes, the rapid, the slow. Sunlight and leaves in combinations so various they might be trivial, though they are not, make a dappling of light and dark. She encounters, without concern, a ruin. New England is a region of common remains. Stone that was hand-hewn, not quite square, raises the lip of a foundation on an old cellar-hole, all trace of timbers gone. From the deep center a birch swells, whitely tumescent in a fringe of ferns. She is incurious but gratified, and she looks intrepidly in, walking around the ruin’s emerging newness, studying curves, angles, planes, a possible portfolio. Not far away in the decayed orchard is a well covered with two capstones, worn granite and a chink between. She stands, kneels, goes down with her palms on the coolness. She stares into darkness that is nothing but black, the whole of color, down into the reverberating density of all essence, meaning with no design, 97 hAyDen CArruth to the wink of light there, glittering. It is immensely distant, unimaginably close. Perception floats on a pencil point that leaves no mark, no line. When she stands she knows the inexpressible that she has always known, the zoom of the absolute in resonances of delight and nausea, the place of ruin, the place of renewal, and she walks away in the traffic of the trees. the seConD version When I went looking for you in the place of darkness that was like a house I came first to the voices I could not see in discourse of great importance to me, to everyone as if I were hearing waves wash along a shore on a telephone, having dialed the wrong number. There was movement, there was a smell of stale grapefruit, coffee grounds, and wine. Everything seemed in one sense quite ordinary, yet I could see nothing, nothing at all. The voices were serious, deliberative, perhaps argumentative, and when I recognized you (by the perfume of woodsmoke you have for me alone) you were reluctant to leave, you were tense and you pretended to be shy, by which I knew that you would not tell me what I failed to understand. But you came with me, even so. You came behind me across stony floors past objects like large sponges or sharks, the sofas and other furniture of that house, until we arrived at the place of twilight where at last I could see you and where you could see me. You stopped, you smiled—I think wistfully— and you turned back. 98 gArnet poems Since then I have stayed in this back garden like a furtive thief lurking in the camouflage of the ivied wall, watching the light fall on the green hills far away and thinking of you. the thirD version Urashima, the fisher boy, was abroad on the sea when a girl who has no name in the story came to his boat. So lovely was she that when she invited him to go with her he went—and found himself far in the depths of darkness undersea, before an obscure palace more impressive than any dwelling one can imagine. Urashima and the girl lived together there for three years in untroubled happiness, surpassing anything he had ever known or suspected, but then the fisher boy grew homesick. “All right,” said the girl with no name, “here is a sacred casket that will take you safely home, but only if you promise never to open it. Promise?” “Yes,” said Urashima. And it was so, the casket floated him safely home, but there, amazed, he found everything changed, his parents dead, their house gone, whole villages where once the fields had lain empty, and Urashima soon discovered that he had been away not three but three hundred years. He was devastated. He went down to the beach and looked into the ocean’s darkness but could see nothing. Perhaps, he thought, if I open the casket . . . He opened it, and at once a wisp of white smoke came from it and trailed across the sea...