Potency
I am the wind.
I am less than the wind.
I am a tree. I am greater.
I am an ant with strong ant arms.
I am a weak flower, a little violet, with no arms at all, no power.
Yet I am greater, much greater than these.
I am the pansy and I stop the wind and I collect the rain and I shelter the ant when he asks me for shelter.
I am the dark pansy, alive, living with power.
Which I carry under the banner of potency.
In the name of flowerhood.
With dark-petaled eyes.
And bright soft faces.
I am the pansy and I do all this. And nothing can undo me.
From my pansyhood.
Nothing can undo me.
Yet everything — anything — can undo me.
The slightest being of power tramples me down.
Merest whim renders me broken.
Plucks my connection to my roots, to my ground.
Smashes me so I no longer hold forth in my dark pride into the sky.
Tumbles me from my sky.
Any being of power can do this. (Angry wind not excluded.)
I am a weakling, a nothing in power, flexed against these others, these beings of power.
I have potency, my personal delicate potency, and that is all.
That is the end of it.
It is my darkness.
Darkness
Darkness, it is beautiful. The dark.
It is my lips sucking at what I know not.
It is my fingers gone into dark places, like a ship of explorers.
It is me forgotten in my desire to explore.
Yet I am the vessel that does the exploring.
It is my toes when they meet ground, power flexed against power.
It is my knees conscious, like springs, of their final connection to the ground.
Ground is not-me.
Sky is not-me.
But my potency declares itself against the sky, against the ground.
Where I am is not-sky.
It is not-ground.
It is a mystery.
I am darkness. I move like a ship among the unknown.
I myself am the unknown.
The unknown darkness.
I shall lap over you, another unknown darkness.
I shall splash over you in darkness and un-know you.
In the dark rain of dark life, we shall be.
(I wrote these poems many years ago—in early May of 1978—in one sitting. Potency & Darkness were included in my 1990 booklet, Darkness and Other Poems.)
