Being And Ending

Karl J. Sherlock

". . . just as the eye was unable to turn from darkness to light without
the whole body, so too the instrument of knowledge can only by the
movement of the whole soul be turned from the world of becoming into
that of being, and learn by degrees to endure the sight of being, and of
the brightest and best of being, or in other words, of the
good."—-Plato, Republic, Book VII ("The Allegory of the Cave")



A guide signals a lackey
with a wink so that
vines of light bulbs
will flicker out then die.
It’s an old trick
wrung lackluster now
through years of slogging
tourists through the caverns.
But just the same, in this dark
where even smell is fatigued
by the lichenous miasma—this dark
(darkest by its dense and clammy seal
of mineral crust), darkness which is
the be all and end all of dark—
no twinkling universe or
interstitial crack of light
remains to cheat the hunch
that this must be our end.

The blind youth, unimpressed
of course, says "Big deal"
and from others come
the tentative sniggers or
elated ghostly groans
that soon enough grumble
for the lights again, but the seconds
seem blacker now,
our tour guide holding out
for the thrill so that,
like a dark star, a shadow
imprisoned by shadow, I have to
prod the abyss, shuffle woefully
in inches for a wall, the task
wrapped in the focus
of my own silence,
the horror of colliding bodies
nearby, the breathy emptiness
of feeling nothing, of becoming
nothing, until a thumb and
a broad palm, which are igneously
light and stiff at first, unfold across
my cheek, and the two of us, without courage
to move on or speak, see the good
in seizing one another.

Karl J. Sherlock