Longing (2)

There are intervals like this, when you go beyond your personal pain and reach some kind of grace, or something approaching peace with yourself.

Transforming affliction into affection, lingering on the irretrievable loss -- yet moving towards a future, recovering hope.

Knowing yourself in the late afternoon.

*       *       *

as longing stretches out

and begins to detach itself from

the initial object of longing

it becomes present everywhere

and can be found in everything

forming and informing everything

the weight of this stone is longing

the curve of that tree is longing

and longing makes the lightest breeze

sigh in the tall dead bracken

longing is not for this or that

but is longing for itself alone

to know itself in the late afternoon

longing is a kind of lingering.

--Thomas A. Clark, At dusk & at dawn (Nailsworth: Moscatel Press, 1988), n.p.