Rivets of Darkness

There was darkness
and the darkness that was there
was on the face of everything.
And there was fire.
Cold fire, blue steel fire, semblance of fire,
semblance of light, fire without promise or threat. 
And there were figures, shadows of figures,
figures figured against the light, 
a semblance of figures, but figuring hardly at all, 
in a huddle, huddled round flames lacking light.

All this was there
because there was God, tongue-tied and silent,
a murmurless mummer of God, miming creation,
re-making in mime, His one misbegotten, the one 
for which a God could never forgive himself,
for which He Had from Day One made Himself
the invisible part of His world.

Only the hands,
the hands of a weaver stand out in their 
intricate movements, balletic with grace,
weavers in space, weavers of time
and spinners of space.
And the eyes with the hands...
two halves of a coin spun as one,
but in more than one space.

And then there was grace,
pure grace in a visible darkness hung like a blanket in space.
Impenetrable darkness, impassable darkness, 
a God-produced darkness that covered the face
of creation and darkened the grace.
Eyeball to eyeball the light and the darkness,
the misbegotten and the misbegotten's grace, 
stared back at each other like ghosts of the past.
Creation had needed the rivets of darkness to hold it together.

But always the hands were mesmeric!
One chink of light as if curtains were parting
and two dollies swam into view.
Not dolls, but mummies perhaps; inhuman,
but human in form, devoid of all detail,
as featureless as landscape was at the world's beginning,
the hands now a shadow of themselves,
hands behind hands, hands manoeuvering 
puppets in space, arranging their limbs,
the Final Cause causing 
one to sit on a tree stump, 
one to stand in a scene increasingly bland
as the window sparkles with light,
but is nothing but palm trees and sand.

This is a redraft of a poem I posted about 3 years ago. You can read the original here