Looking for Serenity
"Sometimes in the darkness, you can see more clearly." from UNDERLAND: A DEEP TIME JOURNEY by Robert Macfarlane
This is my first time writing here with my altered eyes—my 20/20, able-to-penetrate-the-darkness eyes. My post-cataract-surgery, unafraid-to-drive-at-night eyes. My blown-away-by-the-brightness-and-saturation-of-color eyes.
What We See, What We Cannot See
Tiny bubbles are rising in the glass of fizzed water my husband has poured to go with his espresso, also freshly made. They rise expeditiously to the taut surface, like desperate divers fearful of asphyxiation. Rising out of nowhere to nowhere, visible through the water and then disappearing.
Only a slight disturbance, a little shake of the surface and the reflections it holds, reveals that the bubbles have ever reached the top—where they burst and vanish, as if controlled by a cosmic magician, into thin air.
What else is there that I cannot see?
Physicists tell us that Dark Matter, which exists outside of the visible world, comprises 85 percent of everything in our universe, without reflecting, absorbing, or emitting any light.
It’s a head-spinning notion—and yet it also makes sense on some deep spiritual level.
Every human culture intuited or imagined an unseeable place (usually underground but sometimes in the sky) teeming with the shades of our dead, who speak to us in dreams, and to whom we speak in prayer.
Such a small fraction of all that is—a measly 15 percent—is known to us. The rest of it is unseen: a mystery to be unraveled.
Since childhood, I have always sensed the presence of something unseen. This is, I suspect, a common experience for writers and most especially for poets.
Without knowing I was doing so, I taught myself to slow down sufficiently to feel the passage of time as it unfolds for trees. For rocks. For sand. Sussed out the transmissions of the roots beneath my feet. (Like every writer, I’m an unrepentant eavesdropper.) Envisioned my own future entwined with the mycorrhizal network underground.
I know that the words that sometimes visit me are gifts from the unseen realm that’s pulsating with beauty belonging to everyone: music and poetry we try to capture, to remember, in that magic time between dreaming and waking.
I find it tremendously comforting just now, in this frightening time in a world that seems on the brink of self-destruction, to think of all that might exist in that 85 percent of existence we can’t see or hear or know—all the gorgeous colors we’ve never seen, all the wisdom and beauty. All the laughter. All the love.
All the possibilities for healing.
METEOR SHOWER
by Barbara Quick
A denser brew of darkness as we walk,
blindly, down the pathway into night.
Heads craned back, we fill our eyes
with stars that start to fall from blackest skies—
moments too brief to register as real
and yet they pierce the heart
like all the greatest works of art.
Each glittering trail of light festoons the night
and feeds an appetite for more.
And more stars fall and, sore of neck,
we lay ourselves upon the ground
to contemplate the burning space debris
more comfortably.
Our still-warm selves the topmost skin
of all the layers of all that lived and now decays:
The future home of all we are and all we dream
in gleaming transit through the dark.
The earth that will replace our breath
and know the final number of our days.
from The Light on Sifnos (winner of the 2020 Blue Light Press Poetry Prize)
