Prose More than Inspired by Henry Rago's "The Knowledge of Light"

In a pool of momentary brightness, minutely interrupted by velocities of rain, I considered amalgamations of leaf and cloud reflecting on the dim splendor of the dusk, whom a light breeze shook like the eddies of the water's slow and flickering stream; these, together, formed a music, a tremulous piping, the shadow of a tone: it was the light singing itself to the luminous stars.

I had heard the deep uttering itself, and seen the sky in congress with the earth, and so I began to write on this eternity of mirrors, each searching for its own reflection in another self, with a trembling hand -- "How an arbor, river-twined, spills into the long, slow shade, only to bloom again, below the pitch, in a glaucous confluence of boughs..." -- thus twisting the fabric of silence until it stretched and curved into a bolt that could crackle under stones and make them sing the heavens' pulse, who were already wobbling on the low sun's bow, a hidden sign for ascendant birds.

Then the sky changed into the circuit of the moon and became a shadow for the sake of other shadows, a darkness looking for and looked upon by the deeper darkness below the single glitter of that pearl. The light, so distant from itself, still became, even for its coming into darkness, a kind of knowledge, coming to itself, so that it shared in what itself could only know, coming on the other in some way, and hence becoming well.

I am still watching them, these dancers cleaved by darkness, dozing in their half-dreamt effervescence, while they glide to either lucence before joining, snapping back together in a flash, as darting wings tilt and flap, drifting slowly apart, only to merge in a single arc, one beating heart.

The year is still wading, awaiting, by the reef, the moment when the current will sweep and carry the seasons into rapid ice, glazing this island, these oceans in a cold remorse of watery light, curved into a spear that will draw the silent night. Still I speak, waiting for the word that contains of itself some language, transparency of the darkness that arches into the sky, covering the naked year with the perfection of these hours that, one by one, collapse, like marbles falling into a rounded glass, a sphere that recedes to a convex sound, that recedes to a twinkling eye, marveling on an unknown sky.