The sheen
That eyelid of light closes, doesn’t it,
on something that seems like
an estuary because it has a viscous sheen
that could be muddy if it wasn’t for
blue highlights in what are clearly pools,
though the blue could be
the sky reflected in fresh water
or for that matter in a gummy slime
whose surface, like most surfaces, just won’t
disclose the depths we’re
led to believe it conceals, as if
an old trick of confidence like that could
replay with so much aplomb our natural
scepticism steps back and gives the sheen
a moment’s grudging credit, because
it’s not often we get to see
the surface for what it is,
a kind of meniscus stretched
between the latent and the manifest,
the enclosed and the disclosed, the
disincarnation and the incarnation,
light wrapped by darkness or
light as a tunnel whose determination
pierces the enclosure of everything that is, finally,
only obscure rather than difficult,
so that instead of giving in to the
perverse pleasure of incomprehension, all the more poignant
when we know we’re really smart and
have been around a while, we have to go on
preening our performance of recognition,
insisting that we see the shallow for what it
is, shallow, a last resort or look before that
eyelid of consciousness shutters down on the sheen
and the only visible world is the one we view
against a screen stretched across the tenebrous
enclosure of a mental life lived on the inside, as it were,
of a hardy Samsonite suitcase or
a deep Neolithic cave whose narratives
of travel (the cave’s) are all there on the inside going
nowhere because they don’t need to. Don’t need
to go anywhere. And why is that, why do they not
need to, these accounts of life lived
at the very margins of our natures,
where we almost become what we represent,
the angels and beasts, those who go glittering upwards
in columns of hazy dust and those who plunge through?
© Ian Wedde |
