Whatever’s Left of the Sunrise

It’s beyond everything accessible,
Beyond everything you’ve ever pictured.
Wherever it is, there’s a lot of it,

But you’re never going to visit it,
Except by trying to imagine it,
And sadly imagination’s all built

From the timbers of memory’s shipwrecks.
There is a Black Forest, blacker than night,
Black as the light-eating holes of the night,

And you know it, know it’s there, know you can’t
Know it, since if you go you’re gone with it.
And yet, and yet, in yet some other sense,

You’re not only already deep in it,
You’ve always been in it, and you are it.
If you go beyond the periphery

Of the barren worlds that you can visit,
You will find yourself back inside yourself,
And past the blank ice that never breaks up.

The woods return, innocent of stories,
Neither lifeless nor full of lives, black trunks
Of dark needles, through which we’re whispering.