Jared Carter – Five Poems
Alabaster
So soft, even a fingernail
might leave its mark
On this smooth surface – and so pale,
as though the dark
Could not come near, and only light
prevail within.
Come, lift the lamp once more, invite
the spell – as when
The torch of Mithras, held aloft,
revealed those scenes
The ancients knew. When stone was soft
and light pristine.
Aleph
A way to outmaneuver death –
an aperture
Diaphanous, through which a breath
of wind may stir
And sift the leaves – where even light
cannot compare
With what it holds. That is more night
than day, its flare
Of darkness showing, in that blaze,
eternity
Accomplished in the breaking waves,
the endless sea.
Healing
All it takes is time. A blister
develops on
Your palm, corpuscles minister,
and it is gone
Within the week. The earth itself
regenerates,
And color springs from that deep shelf
or barren waste
Come back to life. In this way each
remembered face
Or wave approaching some far beach
falls into place.
Numinous
Flesh cannot know that what it holds
is mind, but must
Forbear, each night, and seek the old
ways, when pure dust
Itself remembers. Who would call
such moments dreams
Must go more deeply into all
that matter seems
But soon forgets: where memories
of nothingness
That never were, and cannot be,
cannot be less.
Owl
Finds shelter here – escapes the wind
but cannot try
Its injured wing. No fear within
those yellow eyes –
Instead, a wariness that sees
beyond my cone
Of lantern light. Would rather be
out there, alone,
Among the firs, where plumes of snow
shake loose and fall
And make no sound. Where nothing shows
but something calls.
Author’s Statement on Beauty
We are familiar with the comment of a certain Romantic poet about the equivalency of beauty and truth, even though that remark has long remained an enigma. In the twentieth century we encounter Wittgenstein’s equally enigmatic observation that “ethics and aesthetics are one and the same.”
Neither proposition can be proved, but both seem extremely persuasive when we find ourselves in the presence of something genuinely beautiful. We know it, and in a strange, ineffable way, it recognizes us in turn – perhaps with the same non-local action that an entangled particle, when measured, instantly correlates with its twin, regardless of the distance between them.
At such moments of encountered beauty, “in this basic falling away of thought,” according to the theologian Cameron Freeman, “the contradictions of metaphysical reason unravel in direct disclosure of mystery in the simple astonishment that there is a world at all.”
Yeats said that while one cannot know truth, one can embody it. If we cannot define beauty, perhaps on occasion we may point to its embodiment. The most beautiful architectural interior I have ever seen is in the Pazzi Chapel in the first cloister of the Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence. Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent.
