Out of Amnesia

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© Steve King

All rights reserved

It surprises so:

the very thought

of capturing the thought—

as when unseen winds

purge heavy clouds

to bare the sky;

all sudden,

all surprise.

Like working through a kind of amnesia—

a something from a nothing,

rising like dumb luck,

too quick a moment

to have planned it all.

What once was void

at last a place

to cultivate the fruit

of one’s un-axiomed conjectures.

As if the air has substance,

a dream weight.

The stubborn blank,

now with full character revealed,

unobscured,

even by the heavy lines

and crude designs

my vanity would scribe.

Bit by bit arriving at a state

that must have always been a destiny;

not just evolving emptiness,

not just a thing unstructured

in its order and command,

but real forever,

biding for its time,

submerged within the interstices,

laced among the things we think we know;

waiting for a moment, just so;

vamping in that offstage blackout,

ready for a cue light to show.

Like lifting amnesia:

reaching through the thin air

of an empty height

to stir a stew of myth

from teeming shadows far below;

a nothing rising to a surety,

desires fulfilled

in the act of desiring,

drawing out the faint shade of a hope,

finally, the outline of a thing

that must at least be called

the stepchild of a dream.

Out of that amnesia,

that emptiness alike to death,

where this strange thing must wait,

for the one right moment,

to gather in a kind of puzzling light,

hovering like one’s own shadow,

yet poised there quite alone,

now whispering old secrets

that you are so surprised

to call your own.