Vulgata: Fragments of a Room

Perhaps the daybreak brought the sun
In galaxies henceforth unknown
Where yet my lifethread had been spun
But into fabric never woven.
My room, a solitary place,
Where childhood laughter used to ring
And echoed still its conquering grace,
Had memories to no-memory cling.
Forgotten voices, gentle airs
Conjuring up, as if they could,
Some substance, soft, which bears
The prints of past life, as it should,
Drowned in the dusky entrance hall
Of silence. Disharmonious fire,
Opaque and deaf, consumed its call
To peace and rest without desire.
Silence is harmony supreme,
A presence, source of being and life,
Its other end, a deadly theoreme
All made of nothing yet all strife,
A silence-property one keeps,
Turning it on and off at will,
Conveying by language quantum leaps
What it is not – and pays the bill.
For man in silence is contained;
He cannot, thus, keep what he is,
A king by his own kingdom reigned,
A whale, ashore, that went amiss.
Myself was left unrecognised,
Absence and silence never met.
Like lost limbs, even unsurmised,
Hypostases claim painful debt.
I was the debt, I was the sore,
A hollow vacuum filled with pain,
A burden, which no bearer bore,
Was carried with unhuman strain.
I knew God was. It was no use.
I knelt, I prayed, I cried, I swore.
An absent self was to accuse
A silent presence of its score.