Chapter XIII — The Silence of Dust

No depth.

It does not peak.

No back, no front.

Waiting is not in a half way,

and am not at the last line lonely.

And I am well not in the beginnings that I left.

Maybe time is not a relative at all,

it is not a third either, at all beyond our reach.

The human will will change nothing really

or may it be the iditself.

that cave animal within,

which has merely been overlooked.

Perhaps I am not myself.

And maybe what I think I should

is not what I would like.

No contradiction there.

no great paradox to resolve.

Something lurks instead.

A secret gargantuan and muffling

are not of any one,

never to the powerful,

not to the weak,

nor to that which is incomplete,

not to the entire.

It does not belong to you.

It belongs to me.

Perhaps you detect it.

Maybe I am observing it.

It presented itself to me as a vision one time.

No more than that it might have been

a momentary glimpsing,

or maybe a grain of the truth.

There is no doubt but not certainty.

It is not a handheld verity,

nor empty words to spit out.

These are ideas, or maybe drawings?

on the wall of my own head.

but in them there is something central,

a nucleus on which my soul has shaken,

and, plucking it up, said it was hers.

Is this what the universe was planning after all.

It may have been the breathing of a god,

or a tune of a sly demon.

It may have been pride in the likeness of confidence

or only the introspective pride

which is that which belongs to the peep of a sight into the future, which none but ourselves can share.

Not all the men.

Not all the demons or angels.

We are, probably, the achievements of some long-past creature

that Preserved lost its instinct at the gradual mutilation of time.

A flock that lost its guide.

then thinking it still knows where it is headed.

And we dream.

And then we go home.

And we are brought back to so-called reality

or to possibly a truth still less merciful.

We opt to be silent.

We take it like any other choice is taken

a hideaway in case of storm,

like speech were a crime.

I am no liar.

And I may simply be a quack The honor of my clan

the world has yet to be increased to flame.

But I can smell the fire on me,

its warmth rubbing already against the margin of my skin,

its patience harsh, and just.

We are at neither end.

across the hungers of meaning

and the Nothingness of knowing.

Our bodies are boats with no tide,

maps without land.

And yet, in that weird levitation,

something there is

some silent writing made by an unwritten law,

an aged pulse which is more ancient than the first star.

You can not take it in your hand.

I cannot hold it.

But both of us are molded by it

by taking an ostrich-like position even as we deny that it exists.

This is possibly the final truth:

that nothing is true.

Is what I see to-day

come tumbling to the dust tomorrow,

leaving just dust that somehow

still has something finitely mine; tastes like the start of the world.

And in that dust,

you may hear a murmurer.

It may be the word of a god,

or the ghast of an incubus.

Or just your very own breath,

reminding you that there you are yet

a weak bearer of a secret

that never belonged to you to keep.