Beneath the Ruined Weather of the Mind

 

Beneath the ruined weather of the mind,
beneath the black liturgies of fear,
there is a small refusal
no flood can drown.
Not thought.
Thought comes later
with its mirrors, verdicts, smoke.
This is earlier —
a red syllable in the marrow’s chapel,
the first inward yes
still warm under the ribs.
When appetite drags its bright hooks through the blood,
when shame boards the windows,
when the soul mistakes the echo for the source,
it does not go out.
It crouches in the dark
like a coal remembering sunrise,
clear in secret,
a wick in the cracked lamp of bone.
It knows bread from stone
even when the tongue loves gravel.
It leans where mercy is.
It tilts toward the Good,
a hidden needle
turning through the iron weather of desire.
Some old tongue called it Synderesis:
the fire that will not marry ruin,
the shard of bright consent
buried under every no.
It is memory before memory,
a homesickness without a story,
the soul’s small instinct
for the face it came from.
Not the loud judge.
Not the lash.
The unburnt room.
The little altar the collapse forgot.
From it repentance borrows flame.
From it longing takes direction.
From it, when prayer goes feral
and language fills with crows,
something still opens
like gold under charcoal,
like a star with soil in its mouth,
like a chapel sealed in the earth.
The walls can blacken.
The rafters fall.
Night can enter wearing every name.
Still it abides —
minute, ferocious, tender —
the last clean ember
the ruin cannot teach to die.
And if you descend
past the quarrels, the costumes, the brilliant debris,
past the drowned furniture of memory,
you will find it,
simple at last:
a coal at the floor of the soul,
breathing without wind,
keeping its scarlet oath.
In the ash-bowl of the heart,
one coal still kneels toward dawn.