[Newspoetry] Dark Understanding

[DL Emerick]

After Section 12, Heraclitus Seminar, Fink and Heidegger
Sleep and Dream -- Ambiguity of APTESTHAI

Dark Understanding

Night is the Realm of the Unknown;
Dream Speaks of Experience therein.

Darkness stands out around all,
and Nothingness appears complete,
as a Totality undifferentiated, unlearned.

A cricket's song starts up,
frantic for sex, if not for love --
the whining of its limbs drives her mad,
unless she becomes insensible to it,
as it grows on her, like a tick on a dog,
sucking out, draining the blood of life.

A puff of wind from God's lips stirs the pines,
my heart listens to their rustled whispers,
stolen from the silent winds God sends,
as needled branches stitch a cloak of peace.

Other sounds arrive, some regularly, some not --
a dripping tap-tap-tap of a water demon in a pipe
in a Morse code where no key has been given;
a shivery clacking as some object falls unseen,
yielding at last its inertia to the pulling action;
a dog yelps and barks when a l one wolf howls;
a distant alarm of horn blasting or bell ringing,
its anxiety shattering peace and then escaping,
unexplained are all these sounds of the night.

I hear my own heart pounding slowly louder,
and, attending, listen to my breath sighing.

Unbidden scents, too, I trace in the hiding dark,
flowers blooming, plants growing, animals passing,
myself almost an odorless to my own nose,
I punctuate the darkness, snapping a lighter,
and in the glow, the smoke I light twines up.
The little flame flares and fails but I inhale,
taste the bitter killer weed in its white wrap,
reach and grasp glass, to sip my brandy's fire.

In that brief moment and glowing moment,
in the clearing lit dimly by the butt I suck,
I see your soft-red, outlined image near me,
your hair drifts darkness far away from me.

I snuff the stub out, its fragments crumble
from burning coals into spent dark ashes;
Darkness gathers deeper as senses lose touch,
while the real slips away as I dream unto you.

But love does not stay in dreams too long --
Abruptly I find I'm in an office of power,
appointed to fill out a dead Senator's term
through nought of the apt political process:
Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to serve us
but he is not a most distinguished gentleman.

In shabby suit, my maiden speech is made;
I appear to be a pauper improperly present
before the well-dressed, well-heeled rulers,
an uncanny misfit before reptilian rapport,
their lidless unblinking eyes scrutinize me.
In humiliation I stand before them as a fraud.
They applaud as they see that I'm one of them.

Why am I here, I think to ask, as I pass;
I dream and, waking, know once more
the dark peace that politics takes away
in its glaring publicity of a sunny day.