A Light Poem
Frank Davey
i.
How the heart has lovd it,
how the first flames have been nurtured,
thru torch & stone, terrecotta & bronze,
even while Troilus
would have begd backward the dawn.
The laborers toil in the fields of rapeseed,
their children in the dark rooms of the monstrous presses,
& later, how the oceans turnd red
at Ahab’s quest, until now
the cachelot plunges alone the black waters
without mate, without child.
Light generates its own darkness,
its own solitudes.
The oceans lie empty,
the sky turns black from the shining.
Leaves that tumbled & curld in the wet earth
while centuries of jungles bloomd & gave
oxygen into this air,
now eats this oxygen like man eats,
eats light.
Light alone
is a few bones of an old cow
reflecting the un-
inhabitable sun so sharply
that they rip the eye.
ii.
Within.
Only an inch within
the moon is black.
Eyes with anthracite sheen
watch, footsteps,
from that point where her gravitas
ends, & stirs.
iii.
I want you
to see.
To see that darkness, cast beside you
by 20,000 feet of green water
standing. The shadows
cast by the fish, swimming there –
one, on one, on one:
from wave to seabed
these shadows & shadows
on square inches
falling.
I want you to see.
Miles beneath your feet
there is light of unprotruded
volcanoes glowing.
I want you to worry for your feet,
for your earth,
for its awkward turning there on,
that silent fire.
iv.
And then
there was light.
It suckt
the ground into light
the people into light
the buildings into light.
One syllable of time,
& there is only that
flash, melted
eyeballs, that flash,
melted eyeballs, that flash
melted eyeballs, pale
etchings of flesh
on the broken walls.
They tell you all
about light.
v.
And so you thought there was light
inside your skull. Like Johnson
thought of his own skull. Johnson, or
Lt. Calley, who created
in their own dark imaginations
a shadowless land,
free of the jackfruit & banyan, free
of the shade of village or mountain,
& at night too, a floodlit
lucidity, an American
lucidity, free specifically
of little dark men.
vi.
Zamiatin, Huxley, Orwell, Burgess,
assaild by long boulevards of flashing
taco stands, muffler shops, billboards,
ice cream drive-ins…
vii.
Conrad.
His mistress’ eyes too
were nothing like the sun.
viii.
I’ll give you my life.
It is a tale
of geometries.
In utero I watcht Herr Hitler
strike matches on the maps of Europe.
A child, & the British
calld his light black
turnd all of Dresden into a circle
of flame.
In the 50’s McCarthy & Stalin
had their own ideas
of a classless society.
The 60’s
married to a harlot who sold me,
in order, eleven hamburgers with coca-cola
three cans vaginal foam,
one white wool rug, one ford convertible,
five paper flowers, one refrigerator,
two cans insecticide, one
split level house, on philodendron,
one bottle Vitamin E, a tape
of The Sound of Music.
ix.
All
are gone.
Now I am learning
of where the seed
sprouts in the soil,
& of what
shines for my seed
its way into my new love’s womb.
There is no light there.
But such life I feel today,
the palm of my hand against her belly.
Such life I feel
in that blackness beating.
Davey, Frank. “A Light Poem.” Four Myths for Sam Perry. Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1970. N. pag. Repr. in W)here? The Other Canadian Poetry. Ed. Eldon Garnet. Erin, ON: Porcépic, 1974. 108-11.