-----The river ran soundlessly with the
ebb-tide. The moon had gone and the street was in darkness. The
tide-cone at the summit of its lofty pole was seen only by its
shape, cast in the field of stars, a phantom sign. A little vapour
rose from one of the chimney-pots, seen only as a shimmering
of stars above the castellations of its rim. The messenger, in
the passing of the night, looked upward, his head raised, rather
than his eyes, to stare at the fluttering of warmth with a temperate
longing, for when he had stopped moving he had become cold, always
it seemed sitting on this step, the stone as cold as the grave
and wet with a slow, heavy dew which did not spare his clothes,
for his coat was wet, his hair was wet, perhaps the message would
have been stained with wetness were it not for his body’s
warmth. Once, between the rare noises, he looked up and saw a
lamp being lit – the flare of the match, darkness, then
oil-light – in an unfamiliar room, a high storey, beneath
the parapet of the shallow roof, the curtains drawn, more than
two hours after the harbourmaster had died, in the coldness of
the night the passing of time being uncertain and irregular,
the chiming of a distant steeple-clock, then the second bell,
perhaps only the echo of the first, remotely, beyond the town,
for here the tower of the church stood mute and black in outline,
and the man, looking up, half-wakened by the sound, saw the lighting
of the lamp, no window lit in any other house, the town in darkness,
threshold of true night, chronology unknown, no coming nor beginning,
he was in that time, unrecordable, no-one to make the record,
true tenebrae, no light beyond the sweep of the lighthouse on
the distant headland, one night the occultation without end,
the closing of the curtains at the window, the glow through the
fabric fading, the lamp carried hence, appearances extinguished,
immortal night,
-----no time for the rising of the questions,
but the protean answers come, sea-born, naked of the nature of
the life and sense of words, come with nothing, leave with nothing,
in the half-observant sleep, too cold to sleep, too tired to
wake, dreams and outward sight as one in time, polaris at the
summit of the vision’s field, the widening arc in the slow
circle of the night, the stars dropping down beyond the roofs,
rising in the alleyways, shone out and were occulted by conjectured
clouds, layers of clouds perhaps, shallow, as nets, widening
in the throw of unknown cross-winds, the protean hand, the stars
shone out and were occulted in the unforeseen, the brightest
tracts of sky, drawn in, as though hand over hand, tiring of
this mad semaphore, tired of guessing the skilful aim, the head
in tiredness falling to the knees in sleep, thinking nothing,
preparing nothing, for the morning, again the approach, to the
river’s mouth and the dark shape of the town, again the
thought, this lonely coastline needs no defence, tenses go, the
sightful hand, the skilful aim, and are drawn away, turns his
head to look at the thin horizons, as they appear in the narrow
slits and gennels, the wet collar of the coat against his neck,
the dew, freezing fast now, on the ends of the hair and on the
coat and on the stone step’s slab, the false dawns appearing
now from one quarter and now from another, the first of them
taking him in completely in its slow effusive progress, the steady
evolution, investing the horizon with a vague and general light,
the thought, no words to it, night is over. Night is over. Making
ready to stand unmoving, lowering the hands and taking them one
from the other’s cuff and sliding them down the body inside
the coat, against the body now the warm companion to the hands,
soon a hunger comes, nature not yet known, had thought it was
for light, the dim opalescence would not satisfy, standing, close
and wary vigil within the close confines, weight on one leg,
the other at something of an angle, the foot on the frost of
the stone step, dark, frost known by the sound, looked down towards
the dock across the square, the quay in darkness, the glow now
falling indistinct, the slow fading of the first false dawn,
darknesses closing in again, the thought, a hunger comes again,
O not for light, I see it is a false dawn only as it goes, one
day fallen short, unnamed, the intercalar day, the first outlining
of those distant clouds’ brief colours in the hardly-moving
turmoil, what a day it would have been, what a tranquil dawn
the true dawn will be, still morning follows, after that I do
not know, the dew dripping from the walls and lintels of the
windows and the rests of the unlit street-lamp, why is the dew
wet there but frozen on my hair and on my coat, am I in a place
more open to the sky, is there no shade of building where I am,
simultaneous with the coming of the dawn, a little after, simultaneous
with the fading, the sounds of waters massing distantly, presentiments
upon the senses, stillness’s acuteness, the uneven sound,
at first unknown, the multitudes of voices from afar, hearing’s
threshold, heard, heard again in memory, in the slightest turning
of the air, the false phenomenon perhaps, unhurried, following
the lengthy miles of meanders through the unknown fields, mind’s
eye beneath the shallow banks of mists, seaward of the town,
at last, close, the sustained noise of waters, slow, more heavy
than a cataract, the bore drawn forward by the weight of sky,
cast the summits of its waves upon the quay and then moved on,
beating in its progress the wooden pilings, the iron piers of
the bridge, the ill-determined lightness faded, the clouds obscured
the stars, the sea-fog rolling landward on the marsh, how less
effusive the grey of this true dawn, memory and world complete,
the proteus returning to the sea.
[an extract from Onesimus by David Wheldon]