1.
In the desert, a halo around the sun, a vast, prismed disk
with within it another smaller though still huge second circle,
of a slightly darker hue, the furnacing glare precisely in its center.
Suspended above us, so much a different scale from anything here,
it seems not merely light refracted, but some more solid substance;
it weighs, and instead of dissipating like an ordinary rainbow,
it stays intact, looms, forebodes, becomes a possible threat,
the outcome of an error, an incipient retaliation, who knows what for?
Perhaps something so dire it shouldn’t be thought of.
2.
In a book in the Fifties, the then famous Jesuit scientist
Teilhard de Chardin posited a theory this puts me in mind of:
a bubble around the earth, a “noosphere” he called it,
consisting of all the yearnings, prayers, pleas, entreaties,
of humans for something beyond—he meant god, of course,
Christ—towards which he believed the universe was evolving.
Ingenious: an extra-material layer, numinous, literalized—
he’d even made drawings—very seductive for people like me,
who had no god, no Christ, but thought they might like to.
3.
I still do, sometimes, wish I could believe. More often,
I’d like the whole holiness business gone once and for all,
the reflexive referencing to what I know isn’t there,
the craving for retribution for the unjust at the end of the chain.
It’s resistant as rock, though, like trying to get shed of the myth
of Adam and Eve, who you know can’t be real, to put in their stead
the pair of sooty, stinking, starving Cro-Magnons who are.
Those bed-time stories, those nightmares, feel hammered
like nails into my mind, sometimes it seems they might be mind.
4.
Now this, a puncture in the heavens, a rent, a tear,
aglow at the edges but dull within, matte, unreflecting,
a great open thing, like an eye; some sensory Cyclops
perceiving all but attentive to nothing (blind, I think, numb),
that makes us believe there are matters not to be thought of,
gaps within and between us, fissures, abysses,
that only leaps of forgiveness might span, might heal.
An angelless halo, the clear gore of light pouring through
without meaning or reason: blind, I think, numb.
—C. K. Williams
C. K. Williams’s Collected Poems was published in 2006.
