The Fourth Night of the Poem
of the Body

 

style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">The windows are opaque and outside the
wind keens in the pine trees. Desire is a figure etched on the glass in
ice, spider lines of white interlaced into a pattern like a rose. He
touches his hand to the window pane, feels the cold there, the black
night entering like a wolf prowling, restless, unquenched. The girl is
an image scrawled against the moon in faint wisps of cloud, and her
voice is the sound of the wind settling low into the branches as it
slows. He touches his own face, tries to find it in the black glass
that glares back at him, the absence that is also presence, the
presence that is absence?

class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0in 0in
0pt"> 

style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">An image comes to him them, like a small
grace: two wooden cups in a pool of lamplight, steam rising from the
tchai as it cools. Her hand touching the cup. His hand on her hand. The
light in the room is like dusk, dim and warm. Outside the sky is
turning colder and the shadows grow long but here, in this space, for a
moment, they are silent. He looks in her eyes. Desire that is not
desire, love that threshes the soul naked, the path that is bitter and
sweet.

style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> 

class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">Later, she is gone. He
sleeps, wakes, sleeps again. Cats prowl in his dreams, hunting in tall
dry grass. A hawk flies over, screaming against the lowering sun. When
he wakes finally he hears an owl's long low fluted and melancholy tones
from far off, a sound like a prayer. Her presence surrounds him and he
hears her voice again, the sweetness of it now, gentle and serene,
focused on the day. Dawn's silver threads are woven through the sky,
the night that is also day, the wind's voice and the voice that
summons, the steep path and the sharp
stones?

style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> 

class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">As dawn opens the sky,
the words come to him now like water flowing and he speaks them aloud
in the pale light, feeling her spirit close by and apart, filling him
to the brim as it rises above him, free and separate and pure. He sees
everything now, as light fills the window: the dark trees, the last
scatter of stars, frost etching the grass with such delicate filigree
the artist's hand is clear in it, for a moment before the sun burns it
away. Her voice comes to him now with such utter clarity it seems she
has entered the room for a moment and stands beside him, looking out.
Patience and kindness, she says, lead to trust and devotion. She
touches his face gently and he shuts his eyes. He feels the weariness
and the strength in his body, the sweetness of desire and the quenched
soul. When he opens his eyes she is gone, the form that is not form,
the brightness that is also dark, these extinguished stars that still
give light?

style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt"> 

class="MsoNormal" style="MARGIN: 0in 0in 0pt">This is the fourth
night of the poem of the body.