This afternoon Les UDs travel to a cottage on a sheep farm near Sugarloaf Mountain. Late this evening they will leave the cottage with two folding chairs. They will set the chairs out on a pasture, and, lying back, they will see what perseids they can see.

Is the farm far enough from city lights? Will there be too much cloud cover? No sense worrying the thing. Do not ask what is it? Let us go and make our visit.

And speaking of T.S Eliot, there’s this excerpt on the dark from East Coker:

O dark dark dark. They all go into the dark,
The vacant interstellar spaces, the vacant into the vacant,
The captains, merchant bankers, eminent men of letters,
The generous patrons of art, the statesmen and the rulers,
Distinguished civil servants, chairmen of many committees,
Industrial lords and petty contractors, all go into the dark,
And dark the Sun and Moon, and the Almanach de Gotha
And the Stock Exchange Gazette, the Directory of Directors,
And cold the sense and lost the motive of action.
And we all go with them, into the silent funeral,
Nobody’s funeral, for there is no one to bury.
I said to my soul, be still, and let the dark come upon you
Which shall be the darkness of God. As, in a theatre,
The lights are extinguished, for the scene to be changed
With a hollow rumble of wings, with a movement of darkness on darkness,
And we know that the hills and the trees, the distant panorama
And the bold imposing facade are all being rolled away
Or as, when an underground train, in the tube, stops too long between stations
And the conversation rises and slowly fades into silence
And you see behind every face the mental emptiness deepen
Leaving only the growing terror of nothing to think about;
Or when, under ether, the mind is conscious but conscious of nothing
I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.
Wait without thought, for you are not ready for thought:
So the darkness shall be the light, and the stillness the dancing.
Whisper of running streams, and winter lightning.
The wild thyme unseen and the wild strawberry,
The laughter in the garden, echoed ecstasy
Not lost, but requiring, pointing to the agony
Of death and birth.

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Dark is mental confusion, our brief weak being in the vastness. Dark is also our death, and dark is the apocalypse that will kill the earth forever; but meanwhile dark is consciousness – our living consciousness, but a consciousness that understands nothing. Darkness is where, unable to think, we do best to wait in the humility of not knowing. We do best to write poetry like this – poetry of still souls sitting in the stilly night, circling the same words — dark dark dark — to make a weak work of bricolage.

Or a frankly terrified work of bricolage, as in the Wallace Stevens poem, Domination of Black:

At night, by the fire,
The colors of the bushes
And of the fallen leaves,
Repeating themselves,
Turned in the room,
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks
Came striding.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

Out of the window,
I saw how the planets gathered
Like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind.
I saw how the night came,
Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks
I felt afraid.
And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

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Same redundancy on the words, our marooned awareness circling the thin evidentiary setting of our mind’s and the world’s dark nature. The brilliant colors of the peacocks’ tails – the brilliant words of the poet’s beautiful and exceptional consciousness? – might lighten all of this. But no.

The colors of their tails
Were like the leaves themselves
Turning in the wind,
In the twilight wind.
They swept over the room,
Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks
Down to the ground.

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So again and again these repetitive bricolages are the poems of our climate, as in this contemporary one, by John Taggart:

Orange Berries Dark Green Leaves

We will not look up how they got their name in a book of names
we will not trace the name’s root conjecture its first murmuring
the root of the berries their leaves is succoured by darkness
darkness like a large block of stone hauled on a wooden sled
like stone formed and reformed by a dark sea rolling in turmoil.

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Pure distilled Stevens: The list of negations, as in The Snow Man; multiple deflecting similes in place of any approach toward assertion; the absence of foundations, roots, meanings, and the presence only of a dark perennial unapprehended tumultuous process of existential forming and reforming; and of course the rolling repetitive style. We are here as on a darkling plain.

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But here are meteors, light streaking across darkness, and we see our own light in them.

“They’re human souls,” I said, “tired of that dazzling dream,
Returning to the sweet, cool fields of earth.”

This line from a poem about watching the perseids is like Cathy’s dream in Wuthering Heights:

“Heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels grew so angry that they flung me out onto the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.”

We see our imperishable earthly bliss in the meteors, as when Shelley saw Keats as “a dying meteor” that “stains a wreath / Of moonlight vapour.”

This is James Merrill, too, in Prose of Departure, contemplating, in a shop in Japan

… the most fabulous kimono of all: dark, dark purple traversed by a winding, starry path…

may be read as having emerged triumphant from the vats of night.