Stellara
—An Astronomy of What Love Leaves Behind—
There are nights when heaven dons
its argent hush, and all the stars seem less
to glitter than to keep their elder watch
over the fathomless remainder of the world.
A train goes through the fields. One window
briefly ensnares a face—then yields it back
to night.
Yet nothing yields back what it has touched.
A word may enter blood.
A kindness, long after its utterance,
may burgeon in another's darkest hour.
A father's voice, long since surrendered
to silence, may haunt the cadence
of a daughter's speech.
Thus absence is no vacancy.
It is continuance
wearing the vesture of loss.
The dead do not ascend.
They permeate.
They pass beneath the common skin of things
like telluric fire beneath a winter field,
altering what they nevermore can touch.
What love once enters, time cannot expel;
It makes the soul the place where causes dwell.
And far above, the stars—
those sepulchral reliquaries of flame—
still pour their antique splendour down
long after their furnaces are ash.
What strange celestial jurisprudence:
that light should outlive its begetter,
that tenderness should outlive the hand,
that one mortal life should leave its impress
upon a life it shall never behold?
Then, between two stars, the darkness opens—
not as a wound,
but as an iris
for which creation has forgotten the colour.
For one breath, the void grows lucent.
I look away.
Some immensities become profaned
the moment language lays its hand upon them.
And I understand—though understanding fails me—
we are not preserved by remembrance.
We are preserved by alteration.
Whatever has entered another soul
has crossed beyond the sovereignty of return;
it cannot be restored to what it was
before the crossing.
I thought the stars preserved the dead in light;
They showed me how the living make them bright.
The stars may perish into their own abyss.
The dead may relinquish every name.
But what has once entered another life
becomes an irrevocable syllable
in the grammar of its becoming—
and what has altered the living
cannot be made unborn.
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