© 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.
