Magi
Nina-no, CC BY-SA 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons
There are no roads that lead toward
the star that has emerged to warn you.
There are no inns along the way,
no travelers to parse the dusty miles out
with stories of their own exotic countries.
There are no clustered palms, no turnings
of the path upon the sudden wonder
of a snow capped peak, no lakes
to lap at the edge of your weariness.
This is the country of your unbelief,
throbbing with the million lights
your ragged wings have shadowed.
Now you are alone and on foot
in the coldest reaches of your universe,
when there at the beginning,
the place you scarcely trust
you ever could have been,
this cold flame has called you.
At first the going’s easy,
once you’ve gnawed to the marrow
your grief over all these ages lost.
Time will melt into a single undistended memory
as you come upon the countless things
you loved to love
and find that now you love them more,
and the more is your unmaking.
For now you cannot touch them.
For now you are the ghost
in the shadowland of your seeming.
But the star burns deeper,
consuming your unquiet years
until you stand on the high bank of a river.
In the fury of the light the current
is a flood of loves, all the race of beauty
folded in the cold repose of death.
And though you can’t keep down your horror
there is nothing left but to wade, to swim,
to taste the salt palmfuls the passing things
press to your lips and hear the cold cacophony
of slapping hands and groans and beating wings.
Though even as the first drops
slither at the back of your tongue, your shivering
grows still. You are drawn on in solitary warmth
till standing naked on the reed crowned shore,
you turn to find the blackness you’ve passed through
aflame with what you thought had passed away,
friends, lands, beloved cities with their spires,
every lip and petal, each lash and bud,
striking fire from the unbegotten light
that up till now has blinded you.
Now you see the river that you thought was death
is a rose like an ocean, awash with angels
sweeping its crimson ridges, dropping grace
like grains of pollen in the terrible speed of their flight.
Nothing lies between you and the star
of your transfiguration, a woman with a child
in her lap, though even as you gaze
upon this secret in the recess of your soul,
the child seems to leave itself behind.
The tender arms extend and swell.
The smooth skin bruises, bunches up
with corded workman’s muscles fallen limp.
The softness of the hands and feet is caked
with dirt, the palms and soles tortured into bloom.
You cannot see the blade that struck eternity
from blood but in this piercing you feel
all the weight of darkness into which you’d gone.
You lean to press the oozing side that is
your own great emptiness and find
the infant has appeared again to grip your finger.
And his touch is death to you,
and his mother’s smile shakes you,
as if the universe were trembling
with the love that is at last your undoing.
Danny Fitzpatrick is the author of the novel Only the Lover Sings and editor of Joie de Vivre.
