The Dark at the Flame's Center
by Paul J Gies, © 1980
Sections: I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII



The Dark at the Flame's Center

Flenon, to Daphne



Prologue

We walked the senseless earth,
immortal children growing up among pebbles
but after our devils had given us up,
after we had hidden long behind naive looks

she walked our woods and sang the trees to life
Vivian, the sorceress of our dark beginning

called us from behind
the thick old coats of our hearts' closet
where we hid giggling

we'd hardly memorized her face
when alone among enemies she was bound in spell
her own sorcery and the necromance of the Mathematician.

Imprisoned in solitude, now, yesterday, always
until only we elves out of all the worlds remember,
beyond the paths of continents she waits
and the trackless hills, the deserts in the sun
hide her buried road, conceal, forget
the traces of her long toes in the dust.


I

 Amidst the flowering June meadows
I notice that she is gone,
I find that we ride the fields alone,
and her form that shone with its own light
slouches now in some tower's inmost cell.

The sun on my back should cheer me
but her lined hands clutch
the sweating steel of black bars
in a lantern's greasy light, or deep
beneath forty fathoms of stone, beneath
some monster's whip she hangs shackled.

That she in the prison of her pain crouches
while you and I, Daphne and Flenon, ride
the golden meads, unsure beneath an unsure sky
taking supporting roles in the tale of the grass
while before night, seeking our camp, we pass

that across the mountains piled on her forlorn path
I must clear the way, build the road and walk it,
that is the scar of my youth, child that I am
who never fell in love before.

So the lilac on the breeze
goes sour on my tongue, and the horse's jog
is an interminable trial, and amid
the glorious paths of bees and the triumphs of trees
the smack of carrion falls on my lips.

What path must I take to find her,
down granite canyons in roadless continents,
what black rivers and sunken coasts must I sail
through months of stormy nights and centuries of doldrums
to reach the iron height that contains her fire?

What sky will glower upon
our next meeting, and under
rearing thunderheads, or the clean sun of midday
will she take her next free steps
her feet marking the earth as she

walks away from prison
turns her back on walls

and down the cliffy roads of the wasteland
or squirrel trails in the nighted woods
we take our slow paths down the years

and what strange seasons lie between
that sunny meeting and this, my dejection?

I said I would pursue hopelessly.
Pursue indeed--in what direction?

I said I would climb the stark walls,
swim the white falls, cross
and cross again the dusk's deserts
to scatter arrows among her captors,
to stand with her in a last massacre

but here I find myself
in no particular place

in brushy country, path-forsaken
and where from her hidden trail I have strayed
so not a vestige lasts to prove she passed
there is not sign nor prophet visible.

But I know well
the cool of the chain
the prodding clench of torture the choking
of relentless shadow the eyes in the dark
the poison mixing in the pit of the heart

for every unguarded minute the horror
presses in on me, and my reason sits
like some confused board of directors
locked away from the revolutions below.

We know the knowledge of her proud, proud mind
that there is nothing, nothing she can do,
we are weighted by her hopes of us, dragged back
from sleep by her sea-green eyes.

So we stumble, you and I,
from grey plains to green hills to
cities innumerable, stumble stricken
along roads empty of people:

and we great heroes, Daphne, Flenon,
whose epithets would exhaust pages, sit helpless
drinking young wine in the
labyrinthine cafe of Today.


II

 Our sorceress was
as always locked away
wrapped in outer darkness.

Her shadow had left the door
of the priestess Neorin
whose traps are baited with cities,

of Odflor of Foravan, eldest of my race,
father of murdered sons, lord in island exile,

of Susan the White, of Janet the Red, of their
friends and enemies the Grorian Wizards,

and Lorin's hermit timelord Eamond
whose beard-end dusts the stones of Efling's strand
saw her not, old man in the youth of the world.

Her foot was not heard in Christa's shadowy hall
where Silon's dark empress ponders her next move
as the centuries ebb, long waves on the mind's shore.

From Gahan's golden bed she had vanished

and from our upper chambers
from Indelnar, my father's wood and mine,
where yesterday as a child I saw her with all my elders,
Elcarth and Felacon and Telvir the White,
such beautiful princes that so soon
were found crushed and broken on fields of war--
so much of our blood has spattered the fields
of Semvov, of Astracan, of Despre
where Antor's sword cut his brother down,
blameless Elturri, whose last cry
was a song in our ears, and we slew Antor singing--
so much of our life's essence
on the fallow earth has fallen

that we seem stretched,
translucent, glowing with the heart's heat
or clear with the darkness behind us

and even if we should
turn back the calendar, seal ourselves
in clockless castles on nightless peaks
or in the impenetrable shade of our
enchanted trees, meres steaming with magic,
even if in elven amber
we sealed out fastnesses and were preserved

somewhere beyond the stream of seas
still on the height where smoke stings the eye

her night-black hair would fall before her like
the hours and days of a century counted out
and we in our island preserves would be

as talkative apes in amoss-shrouded tree.

Vivian was gone,
by half her suitors forgotten, who now
tore at eachother with claws of war
while we hid ourselves, tossing up
green towers by wooded rivers.


III

 Hiding in green slopes
watching the cool sun of morning

sleeping, waking under black skies and white small stars
shadows, clouds of ink crawling the gullies

feasting desperately in golden halls
camouflagted by turds and roots

building our power in our
chlorophyll concealment

whispering among leaves in the afternoon
with elfin notes that the traveller heard, pausing
to stare at the leaves' blurring pages:

we waited, we grew,
but shrank too,

and when the traveller was gone,
behind the sun our stepfather's back
we crept, young immortal princes (we were sure)
I and Rosflor, to peer
across the light-years to the outspread stars.

"What was she like?" he would ask
on the verge of a hill where in a hundred years
barbaric tides would swim together slaying

where we sat in the slumbering grasses drinking
the starlight on those roadless continents
ten empires laid end to end:
sat in the muttering grasses thinking
through the catalog of years and realms
and a million scenes linking.

"She was tall, tall as my father,"
as the old sickle moon rode high
before the sun's pursuit and I
stared hard at the stone of the eastern sky

horizon that might have been sea
if my eyes could but penetrate the shadow of molecules,
a dozen leagues of swarming air.

A few stars chased their blue shadows
as long breaths of wind in the sea's lungs
muttered patiently in the moment before waking.
A cougar laughed her warning
from a stump on an angled cliff.
They were all up, sniffing the dawn,
waiting for the late-sleeping sun.

We were not then concerned
about roads, we fretted not
over directions, the forest's green shields
were our walls, and the sloping coast
extended its questions before our feet,
unmapped realms, doors standing open
before us, that no key could lock.

I stride the slope of Tar Anardis hill,
an old lord in an old year,
or climb the stair's white stone
that under a million boots has not broken,
glare from my portals and recall
that these long years has Rosflor lain dead

and it is you, Daphne, that beat me at chess,
you that are my sword hand:

I squint out my arrow-slits and know
my tower will stand forever, and even so

"I remember her soft disturbing voice" while we hid among leaves, she
was waiting in distant darkness.


IV

 Elf and orc
contested in silver light

the cry of swords, the curses
of battered shields spoke across the fields

sun and star and morning sun again
heard the screams of slain and slayer

great-handed princes with pearls on their brows
strode crunching skulls beneath their white shoes

trollish warlords, mongrel creations of perverse saints,
masses of black goblins dashed--hellhounds stooped
                to pick absently at faces.

At first we battled under red cloud
in a dusky hour that might have been midnight,
our silver shoes and white arrows mired
in the filth of the wasteland and the blood
of High Kings and of horrors

as in the plain Raklaf broad of arm,
of the bronze scabard, whose sword-fist
crushed iron helms and broke the stone of walls,
whose great boots trampled the remains
of fair warriors, and whose mouth
was the grin and glare of glory and glorious death

met Flenath my father, the fast runner,
as he knelt beside his cousin's cooling corpse
whose bow had sung beside ours in the woods
of Amindal, and by the Forrek's channels
that cut gashes in the mountains' granite petals.

The red light was on the troll-king's brow
but the white arrow found a secret way
and his green blood leaked as he forgot power

then swift the morning
heralded by crows
when we thought we had won the day,

but that night Flenath rotted on Semvov field,
his body seized by Lakanth, wizard of the Well,
Rosflor and Orthant his son and shadow
were locked in their green castle under siege
and I and Han of Flor were in the hills,

our cause broken, our swords notched,
our fathers slain and our only refuge
a continent of wind and stone and scrub,
of viny wolds and dark interior vales
held down by four black castles,
Ipre and Serres, Laton and lofty Sinafror

as a few miles fell behind,
as a few days trickled from our bitter cup

there came like a following wind the forgetting
of the load-bearer on the long road:

we forgot what was possible and only did
what was necessary.


V

 My nieces and nephews can be seen
now and then in the leaves' gaps
hunting crickets, fathoming the creeks mud,
with willow-spears dashing to the chase,
to fade and diminish as their strife moves off,

growing again as singing they return,
conquerors with daisies in their hair,
as trailed by cheering apes
and the scampering golden eyes of long-haired cats
they pass before my seat in crescendo:

Rorven, blond Elir, Clahan and tall shapely Aro,
their pageant finished with my nod

for I that clutched the leg of my great-grandfather,
Telvir the High King, am king now in his woods,
a few thousand live here, that like me lasted
to see all their forebears in blood fall,

a handful out of what we were when
all this was young, young like a crimson dawn,
and all our wars to be seemed bright clouds of daybreak.

Of the brimming wells of children's faces
you can still catch a sparkle in the sun between trees
as they wander, forgetting again the hill
for the forest's netted paths,

taking the golden-green spaces of arched clearings,
the soft dirt of trails under the beams of great boughs,
the inside silence that walks brushed by the fronds
of dark weeds that grow by unmirroring streams--

as I wandered in the days after the battle,
in the dark years after the war,
when Han of Flor, the half-divine archer,
went south to his fate, and we all assumed of course
that he would die there and we would forget his face,

and yet in a year we heard
that Han held Semvov by the strength of his eyes.

In the shadow of oaks on the height
of a long slope of grass under an empty sky
I found a mortal man sleeping in black armor
bearing the eagle and the bolt--the lord of Luthan's walls

who told me of his city's firy fall.
Asvilek the Haughty, he was called.

His grandson was a toddler then, whose wars
would rebuild the old man's lost realm
and merit him special foes, priests and wizards,
and of his demise and death no father could boast.

Riding the wind down a slitted valley
in the Tollfells, ridge of black cliffs,
I heard voices on the air

but too slow yet, too bound
by the constrains of horse and harness
I watched the breeze fly on with its secrets
as I pulled up in the gully's mouth to listen,
wiping my forehead, to a few birds squabbling.

In extraordinary spirits I drank
yellow wine under an ash tree
on the brink of an oval mere's grey wall,
ate grapes and hard bread, gifts
of the enchantresses of Kengarven, in return
for an old song that I don't sing anymore--

I picnicked in childish delight but
the quarter moon sank toward mountains,
the night wind walked through the camp.

Across two or three great ranges,
across the restive blackness of the Forrek River,
beyond the shadow-stained height of Sinafror
lay my dead father's land

but I clattered on
down sick roads trying to remember names
through morning greay and golden autumn noon
through sunsets and night watches, foggy winters
of stony paths in gullies with mist brimming
and shadowy summers in the forest's green closets

where walking down a wooded hill I heard
the whistling of a walking elof, one of
my kind--and amused myself setting a rope-trap, only

to find it was Rosflor hanging red-faced by a foot,
to find it was my cousin--we did laugh,

but when we had recounted
the tale of our times wandering
it was clear that each of us had spent
the years as in sleep and done nothing.

Across the craggy east, in view of the sea
lay my father's kingdom sleeping,
empty of thought, unremembering.

So through Ektaya's tilted vales
by light filled like brimming glasses
we turned, fresh as from dream

and on a night of no moon
on a night of a million stars
as snow drifted in Ekut a hundred miles behind
we came down stepped pathways to the river's sources,
to the threshhold of my country

but it was not yet my home.


VI

 The pearly tower of Anardis
held aloft its green banner like a string
tied to a milennial finger.

I left my valley land,
rode off with Rosflor, mounted again
on another of my horses--I've outlived
many steeds in many hard seasons.

There is a field
above the ridge, edge of our river's road,
above the eaves and shingles of our wood,
from which, viewing wouth, my father's white tower
alone breaks the surface of the forest,
its verdant flag leaping in the sun.

There at journey-start
under unflowering yews I leaned viewing
in that sunny place, and all I could see
beyond surfaces, sunlit and sky-reaching surfaces
were shadows: in back of each bright leaf,
the deep secure shade of the valley oaks,
the darkness past guessing at the hearts of trees:
such fountains of power, such cores of intangible blackness.

Here in the center of that candle
stands Tar Anardis, white wick and conduit
of the magic that binds and preserves,
the creative force of Flenath's ring:
to endure though all else rots.

I, fair-haired Flenon, wear that ring.
Rosflor would have had me refuse it, but he's dead.

The ring was in its amber case
upon a cubic stone in the high-windowed turret
as we stood stretching up from meditation,
climbed mortal horses and rode off
immortal under mortal pines and birches
down a track that wasn't there a century before
which in a million rainy days has since
evaporated from the land.

"Her nose was small and pointed,"
but we said less of her than we thought,

embarking once again on "moral war",
on missions of the cause,

I, fair-haired Flenon, slayer
of no great warriors:

"She used to pat me on the head,"
during my centuried childhood.

Her print had long faded from my skin
but I still felt that white hand on my shoulder.

So as the horses speeded to a good trot
my mind almost composed her face's image:
the sardonic curve of lips, the eyes
arrowhead sharp--but in the drifting wind
in the gliding of light

the present dragged me back clutching and crying,
the present, trees in the September sun
on the east slope of the Hooktooth Mountains,
the present, bonfires before
the siege of Semvov, torches
set in skulls in the depths of Sinafror
where some poor human blighter screamed his last--
rivers everywhere, pressed by gravity
but ours is not the path of least resistence:

upward we stumble,
shambling toward the houses of the sun,

while ever as our feet reach higher holds
the weight drags us all the more
of her green eyes aching in the ravine's dull smoke,
of her sighing voice, her long breaths gathering
like dirt before her door

and yet as shoulders stoop toward earth
and eyes watch helpless as the goal retreats,
yet foot lifts after foot
and the torment of the hopeless climb
lasts only for a time--then you find yourself
on your own

as I found myself on a wooded road
narrow as a library corridor

the leaves grabbing at me like
so many titles

no yesterday, no tomorrow, just
green behind me, and before me green

until a single note touched my ear,
a voice flickering like a tiny bell or a flame

a maiden sang to me--Lifwin did, so young
I forgot she was as old as I--

fleeing the deaths of companions,
I was charting the forest's halls
oppressed of mind, in bad days,
spirit bleeding and soul full of scars,
body in patches and memory in the clutch of nightmare--
I never can tell memory from dream--

and when I had lost count of fevery days
then Lifwin, grey and narrow, sang to me:
Lifwin, skinny ribs and long narrow limbs,
mended my various wounds and we
slept warm under the blankets of winter.


VII

 On the fallow land
an empty night lay.

Unnamed parents of immortals,
unknowns who would be heroes

passed along the perimeter
of an unmarked territory.

Black oceans waited.
Stars pierced the cloudy waste.

Elf-children, their costumes
colorless, stood apart, musing.

To these nascent princes, awakening
immortals, infant angels, to
us, as we once were, dark,

in the flowering dawn, light bringing

came the two minstrels of our cause, whose cause was
the teaching of spirit to mere matter:

the scarlet priestess high-skulled Neorin,
whose long feet print the strand
of centuries under the still-dawning clouds, and

our sorceress, swift-worded
Vivian, whose vaporous threads strung together
phrases and nations, thoughts and blades,
like beads on a string across the vacuum of years

the teaching of spirit to mere mortals:
this cause Neorin left like a shining stone
to conceal in the deepest pocket, safe,
and bring forth only at certain odd times
when stars or kings failed to align.

Our sorceress left us more: her emerald
eyes, the innate logic of her opaque
falling hair, the casual imperative lines
of her ancient face
                            where were those
unmarred eyes, dark lips, their ends curled,

while I grew to my full, forgetting,
trying to remember who it was I had forgotten--
some dream from the unmapped regions of childhood?

Sitting on the grassy slope at twilight
awakening from youth's dream I knew.

What we heard, late and partial and untrustworthy,
the highest of councils she defied,
the Eleven, the Orvolani, and behind them
they spoke in whispers of the Mathematician

and in the prison outside of all our vistas
in the grey room beyond the shadow of
the furthest candle's scope waits Vivian.


VIII

 "We shall have to free her, of course,"
said Flenath, my father, his wrists white.

"My tower shall forever stand,"
he also said,

and here I sit in Tar Anardis twiddling
milennial thumbs.

In the wake of the Great Days
the poets sang wine-soaked memorials
            but I fell asleep in the middle.

I dreamed of empty wilderlands, green
worlds to be crossed, and of a tower

I fell asleep in the middle, hand
on silver cup, my lords about me,
and of the song and its characters, connections,
its lines of event, lines of rivers, aisles
of black woods, only
a sense of wide ways searching

touched me in sleep:
I saw Rosflor ambushed,
his green cloak part red

I saw my son
sleeping by a sleeping river,
or was he dead?

I saw little people walking
the fields under the sun
hundreds of lives walking through their parts
in the growing of the grain

in the months' distance I heard the weeping
of many trees in the long wind

I saw Avenan my mother
at a rain-streaked window sleeping
her eyes dark as the skies

in the middle of an old song I dreamed
the sum of a long life's journey, as above
dusty hills in the late afternoon--like
some impossible bird creature set in the clean sky--
the shadow, the memory, the thought of a tower

my friends drank on, secure in their resolve,
but now Flenath is dust, Rosflor, Linherth my son
batches of bones in the earth, and it is

I who slept through the great debate,
I who shall see the end of the cause.


IX

 Once in Lifwin's tight arms
I awoke to a beam of moon long and perfect
the stamping of horses crossing the night air
the wind singing in the holly outside
of our low window.

The white mist dragged me awake
and in the long night and day of our war
I did not need to sleep again.
To the twilight of dawn I came
as a swift filly neighed and danced from the stable.

A slate-cloaked rider circled
his steed slapping the dirt with a black hoof
his sword bright against dark boughs, his white
palm opened to the moon and to my eyes
as Rosflor cast back his hood.

Our long dog-hours were over, our gloaming
turning to patient dawn, grey at first,
a grey pallor imbuing a high field,
a wood on our left, and then each field and wood
took on its own grey, the preface to color,

then running day, the violet sky condensing
into blue, the long clouds of dawn,
purple impurities against the flag-red sun,
warnings of glorious morning
before our faces as we rode east

as we rode to the sea
though it might be a sea of our blood.

We were tiny eyes, bright blades, "going
to and fron in the earth"

and where our green band ventured,
Elves and Amazons, warriors and saints,
the dark cells were cleansed of their filth and
from the shadow of each forest leaf, from the zazing moon
on the crossroads, we hunted all things malign.

We slept on slabs in the stone valley
of Sinafror, its fourteen gorges' slashed mouths
screeching in the galewind

and once in the symphony of the leaves' scraping
I looked out from the stony seat
upon the peak at the mountains' end

and saw for the first time by some sorcery
the jewelled islands far off in the summer sea,
the home of Odflor and of his failure's exile.

To the tranquil pension of defeat
my toes did not chance to turn.

It is not the shade of a villa that I seek
but the green wood's shadowy rooms
and in the sight of my forefather's refuge
I knew at last it wasn't mine.


X

 Turret on turret, gate behind steel gate,
stained polygons of stacked granite walls rise
from tainted earth, crouching under the mass
in pools of moss, into buzzard heaven,
air thinner than spirit, where the blazing
glance of the punishing day star stares hard
at each molecule of the unclean sky.

The belchings of its highest chimneys seem
almost like clouds--no memory comes back
of nimbus castles in open heavens
when we lay gazing, naming each shape,
no memory of other eyes than those
that glare from fissures in long battlements
or watch, imagined, from the topmost rooms.

The road, buckled and gleaming, here completes
its ascent to the cracked plateau's level,
a gasping altitude of reeks and steams
of black rocks jutting impatient to the air
carved in the symbols of ancient slanders
by the ten thousand denizens of this
prison, this single letter of our fear.

But that was not the tower that I sought,
only Sinafror in its spoiled dream,

Antor's stronghold once, a place of light
that grew too bright for any eye but his,
thrown down by Elturri's sons, who, in their anger,
took no care about foundations and prophecies,

then taken up by the Orvolani, the Eleven,
Lakanth's betraying wizards, Tieran, Passalf,
the hopeless rebels Fissalf, Anon, Gror,
Ririen, Arrono, the cloudlike Lord Avigon,
Photius the survivior, the servant's faithful servant,
and Finaf, the proud doomed last tenant of their lies:

they took up and ruled the world from here,
here came the prisoners of a hundred raids,
the daughters of a dozen dozen princes,
hostages who never saw the sun again.

Yes, the rumors were true,
yes, the soot lay so many inches thick,
the corpses in the pits were piled just so deep,
the walls we scaled, so many fathoms high,
but Finaf skulked alone in his far window,
his armies blown from him like leaves.

Sinafror in all its ochre weight
was but the watchman's shed before
that fastness of old dream that is my quest.

Twenty years after we sealed
Finaf's doom and from banner to basement
razed the mighty stronghold of the heights

I found Rosflor among his soldiers slain,
a hundred rotting foes his death procession.

We had held festival for a week
in the chiselled valley of Sinafror's River Forrek
while above us the stones forgot their slavery,
the dust settled in dry villages.

Then we had come to Semvov's glassy walls
to Humankind's new empire on a summar day
where fourteen kings of kings swore fealty
to Rosflor's green-gold sword.

Past midnight, when the lords of men grew sleepy,
song was called for, and the minstrels played
from lays not a season old, of battles fierce--
the wars Rosflor and I had fought alone--
we had woken from the desperate dream
only to hear it told as history.

Then to Indelnar I rode
quite certain not another step I'd take,
so sure I'd sleep again in Anardis tower,

but with the glowing forest in full flower
and Lethian my daughter a bright child
I heard in dream red trumpets blowing wild.

Hacked and trampled by a hundred boots,
their banners, their bright faces in shreds,
bedded by the unmatchable limbs and torsos
of some of their assassins--their bright blood
blending with the crude brew
of goblins' wounds, in the earth to ferment,

Rosflor my cousin, who by my side
slew Finaf, last red sorcerer of his race, left
by Lakanth and Photius when their war was lost--Rosflor

who by my side, gangling teenage prince,
named each star in the northern sky and knew
each tree on the road to Flenath's tower--

oh, we slew,
sure, we had our vengeance, but the smoke
of another thousand corpses rose to form

a grey castle on air,
a sooty tower to the clouds
that fell back ever so slowly eastward.


XI

 After we won the last war,
we Elves, we Men, and our Amazon allies,
Daphne, your daughters, the spawn of Cerenta,
the axes of the Dwarves and the spells of Timelords,

after all our old foes found refuge
forever in old songs,

leaving the Elves to study
until we had each history by heart,

when we survivors of the golden age
were forgotten in our valleys
ignored by the people of the sea level

and I had got a century of sleep
in the green-covered bed in the tower
while the flowers at the stream's verge
stayed golden through winter, summer, fall

after Linherth my late child
was dust in his fair forest,
his children in exile, singing
of their own golden days

after long rest on an island of forest
in the afternoon sea of the plains
after dusk and fires burning in the evening
night of stars wheeling and grey gloaming
early I awoke to find the sun before me

my boots, pack and cane laid out for journey
though I had thought my travels finished.

I rose in the absolving sunlight, rose,
girded on my sword, though it could not slay my foe,
and set off on foot, though the destination was
a million days away across dry miles.

Lifwin, my lady, stayed in our warm bed,
but by the door, Daphne, you paced the floor,
the only hero left who was not dead.

At first the road led us through
the villages of people that I knew--
of our dusty itinerary I gave no clue

and then the highway showed us
great port-cities of empire, towers
to the sky's pavilions,

but even as I knotted
my neck to see their lofty tops
the road waited, its stony course

going out over the plains
burying itself in the centuries, burying
its stones in the dust of a dozen armies

from village to pastureland we trailed
as out before the wandering eye's limit
the highway walked, heedless of horizon

until in a tumbled region it ran
identical miles for as far as the mind could guess
forever behind and before me to the skyline

grey lands we passed, and green rivers
and deserts past hope, but the road
did not drink, nor did we.

And here I sit in Tar Anardis setting
in past tense the unguessably remote future.

Finally the mountains
edged our path, not Sinafror's puny bluffs,
but jaws like mazes, the gods' fast castles,

against the fist of heaven folding
the broken mantle of the earth in torment,
the rim of the pockmarked world

where in caves we hid from the drilling rain
where in the day we trudged the slanted streams
to new canyons cut out of lofty walls

until one night atop a short incline
I looked to my left beyond the nearby cliff

I have not seen that road, I will not
speak of its end
or in hope imagine it is not
a circle indeed.


XII

 Despite the scarlet dusk and the day's sorrows
despite the nourishing sun of our mornings together
despite the victories and defeats of the afternoon
            we must go into darkness.

The days draw long, become
tired and hot by evening, waiting
for the night to close out the empty hours

but though my years have encompassed
the eventual farewell of all my contemporaries
I can't put back the summers on some shelf,
shut myself in my woods until the very stones
grow bored and walk away.

I have lived in this island of light
but I must venture into shadow and bring back
my hope and my despair

or in the golden day endure
the certainty of her suffering out of reach
in the shadow of the earth

for at the heart of the fire
that burns at the margins of the world
she lies weeping at the gate of nonentity

within the outpointed light,
the heart of the candle, concealed
by the very flame that shows our distant feet

folded in darkness like
the black wick on the candle-s pool.

I could weep here in my hall,
jewelled goblet in my hand, a hundred poets
contending to skewer my grief on butterfly-pins

but pain in the palace of the heart
is a broken tooth set in spun gold.

The road is no circle, but a helix:
I have not touched the same spot twice.

Days I pondered, when I found its end.
What logic explains the candle's riddle,
black heart, all around bright?

So we will walk away
from the doorless chamber

crossed lines on the curving universe
that ran apart far enough
        to cross again.

We will pass the outer darkness, endure
the reducing fire, to come at last
into the impenetrable shadow of the light itself,
the dark at the flame's untouched center.


            Paul J Gies, © 1980
Back to Gies-land