By: Clifford Venho
Night
It hovers
around my ears,
covers my eyes
with clarity of the unseen;
it unfolds, petal by petal,
the flower of its hushed
existence, hidden
in a forgotten corner
of the universe,
away from the fiery worlds
of insatiable burning.
Here you can be still;
here you can be self
without being self;
here you can feel the
seeds of stars resting
in the soil of the infinite.
This is the ground from which
all things arise, to which
all things return;
this is the rich, dark
loam of life and
the chill earth of death.
This is night.
The Mystery
When I reach the end,
I fall into the undiscovered
as if it were a bed of dreams.
The mystery surrounds me—
an ocean of truth, terrible and wonderful.
I listen to what the waves want to say,
to what the depths let rise
into the inner chamber of the ear.
Everything whispers the unknown
in syllables of fire; and it is I
who have sought the inviolate,
the imperceptible—
needing to hear
what hides everywhere
as inaudible name.
Clifford Venho is a writer, poet, and translator. He studied English and creative writing at the State University of New York at New Paltz. His poetry and fiction have appeared in The Westchester Review, The Dewdrop, Modern Literature, the Stonesthrow Review, and elsewhere. His poem 'For a Moment' was shortlisted for the 2020 Arts Competition at La Piccioletta Barca Magazine. He is the translator of several books, including Novalis’ Hymns to the Night, which was published by Mercury Press in 2015. His essays have appeared in The Decadent Review and Being Human. He lives with his wife in the Upper Hudson Valley.
“A poem should never mean but be.”
–Archibald MacLeish
It is a well-known fact that poems should always speak for themselves. With that said, I would still like to include a few observations about what was living in me when I wrote these two poems. My hope is to illuminate the context in which they were written, not their meaning.
“Night”
The night has always been something that speaks to me. It isn’t so much the actual, physical night but the state of “nightness.” I’m a translator, and one of the first poems I ever translated was Hymns to the Night by the German poet Novalis. In the long poem, Novalis addresses the night as a being: “A rich balsam drips from your hand, from a bundle of poppies. You raise up the heavy wings of the mind.” This existence within night and the consciousness that it awakens in me stands at the origin of this poem.
“The Mystery”
On the western coast of Spain, there is a peninsula that marks the end of the Camino del Santiago de Compostela. It is called Finisterre because it was believed to be the “end of the world.” The poem arose out of this image of standing at the end of the world after a long pilgrimage. It is not located in this physical place but in an inner place, in a moment of experience. To fall into the undiscovered, to seek the hidden names behind things—this is a stage along the inner path that is outwardly represented by the Camino. San Juan de la Cruz called it the dark night of the soul. It is in the darkness, in the undiscovered, that we hear the inaudible names, the essences, that speak the world into existence.