The Knowledge of Light by Henry Rago
I
The willow shining
From the quick rain,
Leaf, cloud, early star
Are shaken light in this water:
The tremolo of their brightness: light
Sung back in light.
II
The deep shines with the deep.
A deeper sky utters the sky.
These words waver
Between sky and sky.
III
A tree laced of many rivers
Flows into a wide slow darkness
And below the darkness, flowers again
To many rivers, that are a tree.
IV
Wrung from silence
Sung in lightning
From stone sprung
The quickening signs
lines quivered
Numbers flew
Darkness beheld
Darkness and told
Each in each
The depths not darkness.
V
To know
Meaning to celebrate:
Meaning
To become “in some way”
Another; to come
To a becoming:
To have come well.
VI
Earth Awakens to the work it wakens.
These dancers turn half-dreaming
Each to the other, glide
Each from a pool of light on either side
Below the dark wings
And flutter slowly, come slowly
Or drift farther again,
Turn on a single note, lifted,
And leap, their whirling lines
Astonished into one lucidity:
Multiples of the arc.
Shapes of the heart!
VII
The year waits at the depth of summer.
The air, the island, and the water
Are drawn to evening. The long month
Is lost in the evening.
If words could hold this world
They would bend themselves to one
Transparency; if this
Depth of the year, arch of the hour
Came perfect to
The curving of one word
The sound would widen, quietly as from crystal,
Sphere into sphere: candor
Answering the child’s candor
Beyond the child’s question.
