Poem at the Autumn Equinox


For Arijana

Returning dreams. The one about falling

and the one about a house

owned and lived in but never fully explored

and the one containing a word

clearly heard and recognised

from a language unknown,

which I can never pronounce. Now you have gone

let them take me over. I am their island

willing to be drowned.

After the end of falling, you will come to a river

and walk beside it along a worn footpath

bordered by nettles and willows.

In the house you will find a room

and in the room a mirror,

and in the mirror a portrait of a girl dressed in leaves,

golden and green, and in her hand a wand.

After the word and the deaths of its many echoes

first you will hear a silence strike like a gong

and then from the silence another voice emerge,

and that is the voice to listen to,

that is the voice to follow. The girl

who enters the room and looks out of her mirror

stands on the tide and her wand is the rainbow.

The voice arrives on the tide but is no part of it

and if it seems to belong wholly to the sea

or if it seems to belong wholly to the wind

or if its substance seems partially made of cloud,

reflections, falling leaves, or invisible splinters of light,

do not be mistaken by the sweetness of appearances.

The path leads to cliffs where butterflies and bees

play the summer long, and night is full of stars.

The girl who stands on the tide against a white horizon.

has turned into a willow framed against the sky,

and her wand which was the rainbow has spiralled away

on wings, migrating south for winter. Nothing is left

but emptiness - except for the voice. And the voice

cannot stop singing now, and all you have to do

is burn its sound in your heart and treasure it there forever.