For Michael
The river of night lifts
from the shadows with dawn.
Its rising water thins, dissolves
into air, flows unseen through the day.
You were mysterious, unpredictable, rain
running up a mottled pane. You lived from meal
to meal, joint to joint, pill to pill, sustained
by your mother’s care. Your studies in physics unfinished,
the abstractions of mathematics were your island shipwreck,
where your mind succumbed to paranoia.
Did thoughts about your body’s final state
in the material world concern you? Did you consider
the bridge again, the somnambulism of pills?
Did you think of the duties required of those who tend
to the dead, or the lingering image left in the minds of the living?
The river of night flows through
the emptiness in the atoms of our flesh.
It hides in every oscillation of quartz
that measures the barest whisper of time.
You waited for 30 or 40 minutes, maybe an hour.
Did nothing scare you about nothingness?
As you lingered along the track and the sky began
to brighten, did you feel a coming sense of relief?
Finally, you saw a movement down the line
maybe a glint of sunlight on silver steel.
Did you hear the distant squeak of wheels, the swiveling
shriek of couplings between cars? Did it feel
like the onset of certainty? You crossed the steel armature.
Your shoes shuffled through gravel. Was there a sense
of approaching blackness, dark, feathered wings,
miracles of lonely flight, whispers of eternal
waning, a coming kiss of relief, a gliding
forward of fear, a shout of voices arched
in harmony, a cantata of heavenly diaspora?
The river of night rubs every
shining with soot and ash.
It winnows the precious from loss.
When you finally stepped forward, did you feel a rush
of angels, breath of stone and ice and light?
How did you give yourself up to emptiness and hope?
And where did you go? Who do you know?
Are you even listening? In the end, maybe
it was the way in which your step could not
be undone—your final step into your surest hope.
To you who vanished in the dawn,
chased away by rising light,
may the river of night carry you
into union with your deepest wish.
May you turn to something veiled
against the ravenous light.
.
Daniel Thomas
.