Nick Graham: The Edge of Light Is Always Shadow

I. Bait Ball

At the rim of the circling swarm
of fish are shadows — a tickle of an ending
that becomes mouths billowing
open to consume what must be thousands
of striped, spotted darts swimming
in the confidence of numbers and instinct
that will not, this time, protect them.
How different time is when it ends flickering,
awash, as physics and chemistry extinguish
one life after another until so many
are suddenly still ever after–
so that one or two others can swim on.

II. Remains

The brass caskets or urns are no longer
inevitable. Cremated remains are packaged
into compost for a young tree, and a seedling
carefully placed inside — to be planted or hung
anywhere, really. I’d like to end wrapped
around the roots of a Quaking Aspen
or Japanese maple making me
a little more than I have been. In time
the tree and I will merge as dust,
nourishing some other life surely.

III. Still Life

In the careful arrangements of still life
that artists assemble — separate — reassemble
the rules and variations of composition are studied
and shifted until the light on disparate
or associated objects become the aspects
of a story. The Anjou pears twined into a braided
whip, resting on a malachite table, with a twig broom
hanging on the wall behind creates context
that directs the mind to mortality or grace.

IV. Cycles

The edge of light is always shadow. We know
that it is impossible for the mind to hold all
consciously, passing from one day into decades —
as the tree finds it cannot keep its leaves. Everything
about our Selves cycles, our flesh becomes
the dust around us flaking and blowing.
When we see ourselves or our fellows contract
or soften — we reconstitute their image
until they are a more memory than alive.

V. Transmutation

Fish moving in the magnetism of their brethren,
swallowed by the whale, flushed through the sieve
of baleen or porous flesh — this is the instant
that vitality is transformed, when caloric energy
flows from one being into another.
We swim until the water is teeming with shadows
rippling from every side. What shall we choose —
the noble effort or the quiet release? Do we make
for the shimmering light, holding our breath
so the shadow doesn’t find us? Or do we lean all
the way back into the dark knowing
that we matter only a little, perhaps just as much
as what we have served and loved?

VI. The Passenger Pigeon

From 136 million breeding pairs in 1871, the last
Passenger Pigeon fell in 1914 — and nothing could revive
such light, thrumming beauty. Time had held this bird
for entire clicks of time until men hunted their magnitude
into taxidermy remnants, stories of ‘unbroken millions’
that reported like thunder and darkened the skies for hours
as the migratory flocks passed overhead–all this finally
became merely evidence, cataloged in boxes.

VII. The March

To the tempo of a dirge, we too, will go, slowly — dropping
and stumbling into the pyre, or in the cut-time
of a sudden magnetic polar shift — will evaporate,
when the illusion of north and south ceases, at last.
Surely, there will be few, if any, to mourn,
remember, or even to preserve the final traces
of humanity. Just a collective exhale or cough
of surprise before we vanish, and as fertilizer,
will serve the seeds that remain.

—

Copyright 2015 Nick Graham