By making a past, narrating it, you also unmake it, the poet says. The story might be onesided, partial; it might be retold in another way. Then, too, it might only be a surface effect of another narrative, of another way of telling. It might only be a decoy, distracting your attention while the real story goes untold.
How then, to tell while remembering the artifice of telling? How both to make and to foreground the unmade, erasing what you say as you say it, so that only its utmost edge remains, like the circles a sparkler makes as you turn it in loops, that fade quickly in the night? That fade, and let the night draw forward, that let what is told wear the cloak of what cannot be told.
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In some theologies, there is a kind of darkness that shines. There, in its negative radiance, lies all we can know of God. His absence is bright, present, although his presence is the opposite of all the ordinary things we keep about us.
Or is God what is there as those same things become extraordinary, when a kind of shadow stretches out from what we think we can see? Perhaps the condition of light hides itself from our seeing, and we each of us bear another seer altogether, with eyes all pupil, eyes all night?
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