Darkness Visible

A Book for All and None

Listen! Listen! How it moans with evil memories – or evil forebodings?

Yes, I am sad along with you, you dark monster, and for your sake annoyed even with myself.

Oh that my hand does not possess sufficient strength! Gladly indeed would I redeem you from evil dreams! –

And as Zarathustra spoke thus he laughed at himself with melancholy and bitterness. “What, Zarathustra!” he said. “Do you want to sing comfort even to the sea?

Oh you loving fool Zarathustra, you who are over-blessed with trust! But you have always been so; always you came trustingly to all that is terrible.

You wanted to caress every monster. A hint of warm breath, a bit of soft shag on the paw – and already you were prepared to love it and lure it.

Love is the danger of the loneliest one, love of everything if only it lives! Laughable indeed are my folly and my modesty in love!” –

Thus spoke Zarathustra and he laughed once again. But then he remembered the friends he left behind – and as if he had violated them with his thoughts, he became angry for his thoughts. And suddenly the laughing one began to weep – for wrath and longing Zarathustra wept bitterly.

— Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None

Presence

a found poem: Virginia Woolf's The Waves

He is gone. The fine filament
that spun between us

is darkened now. How strange
this moment. How alien.

He is returning to the world—
to that comfortable

simplicity—and I stand
in the lengthening flocking dark.

Spirits and familiars
are in the corners and the air

is mocking. I feel old.
I feel shabby. Who am I now?

My love took refuge
from me.

— Nazifa Islam

Birthday

Beloved dog, in from the wet
Reeking of earth, licking my face like a flame,
Your red-brown coat and glowing eyes
Clearer than anything in human nature
Tell me I will live another year.

— James Merrill (1974)

The Net

Toward evening the wind changes. Boats
still out on the bay
head for shore. A man with one arm
sits on the keel of a rotting-away
vessel, working on a glimmering net.
He raises his eyes. Pulls at something
with his teeth, and bites hard.
I go past without a word.
Reduced to confusion
by the variableness of this weather,
the importunities of my heart. I keep
going. When I turn back to look
I'm far enough away
to see that man caught in a net.

— Raymond Carver (1987)