| From the book The Wild Rose | Legends and Fantasies
(1976 - 1978) |  |
| Illness | 1
The sick man woke up. But before he did
a huge headache got up,
like a triton blowing up a storm within.
The storm, echoing on all sides,
stayed and sang, closing eyes.
And where he scarcely could perceive
some trifle, a part of the token,
she was looking. Like a lash
she raised her eyes, which had never liked to look,
but saw in such a way that the objects finished.
If he succeeded in helping
the objects, caught up with that illness,
then he saw himself exactly
as a hero, rescuing the princess,
as a constellation that rescued another constellation.
As though he had climbed seven hundred steps,
freeing a woman prisoner on each one,
and now he approached his cradle
and chose himself, like a thing from things,
and suddenly fell, letting go that thing.
2
No, it was not light, not light,
not that which I remember and think of remembering.
I believe that there where I am not
I will meet myself, like wondrous advice,
which I don’t even want not to fulfil.
I feel the ancient connection of dream-sleep
with all who were and did not fulfil the task to the end.
I myself disappear and I am one of you.
I listen to a long and coherent tale
in the huge paradise of the most deep body.
As in a house which was once open,
where it seems everything disappears for ever,
but someone is reading and the lamp is burning,
and its light is talking in the future tense,
and this caresses the closed eyelids.
Oh, how good it is for you in my heart,
how you are not here, how I remember and know
your voice, living like a ruined house,
and the wind, the wind booming over it,
the icy mountain of your corridors.
I think that illness is a unique teacher,
teaching how to lie on the sledge that flies by,
into the iron will, into its sieve,
and twice and thrice to disappear to prove
that –the heart is uncountable as gold.
My destiny is warmed by a hot hand –
a most empty thing that always got lost –
but now they take it out and look at the light
and see: to love you where you are not
is an unprecedented success indeed. | | Richard McKane | |
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