Jacques Darras

1 An Ireland, as of chalk, the sky standing in for the sea, the beach a reach of blue, the vineyards’ green scooped out in cirque, in cove, a subtlety of air laps the eyes, abob like barques come from afar, and the viator standing there, poised to dis- embark, the undercurrent of air escaping him, tossed to & fro, gaze wrenched from its angle of purchase upon the world, capsized, head now careened against the suddenness of rock, eyes whiplashed into new prospects, he drowns in fire, enflamed, fine silk aquiver at the singe of brazier, he burns: would Hell be as blue, or the sun the obverse of God? 2 Now at Laon, the Lugdunum of the North, deposited on this citadel of chalk, white arx, former temple of Lug, the light- god of the Gauls, & he, this Celt from Hibernia, setting foot on this podium, this puy, this platform afloat at cloud & wind height, blown in from the septentrion, breathes in the quintessence of rains, alevel the briar’s pinks, zone where water, at first cold snap, turns to snow. Fallen from fire. Autumn’s pure light whitens the mount, the tufa reverberating the radiance of a Cyclades isle, here mis- placed, high above these plains, by some error in translation. 3 At Lindisfarne, let us suppose — even if Alcuin’s letters to the island’s monks exhorting them to combat the Viking may be evidence to the contrary — that he studied Greek, that Charles the Bald, offshoot of the Pippinids, summoned him here to Laon to translate Dionysus. Between the king’s vineyards & the blue sky, a whisper of the North Sea in the channel of Île Sainte when the seals bark at ebb tide, Johannes the Hibernian cocks an ear despite finding his coracle of Latin too frail a craft to explore the peninsulas of Greek, & carries with him the long-lapping waves of Scotland & seaweed’s tang where kingfisher nests beside nugget of amber. 4 That which lies out of reach taking the shape of this white & shadowy rock on which he is now beached & whose slope he now climbs, blind beneath the sun, fallen from the same height he ascends, would Satan be extending him his welcome with the same dark radiance of stone between his eyes & the same fine peppering of pinks that spice his senses on either side of the stairs, against this, what whiteness, what candor? The sky’s rarified air, there to calculate the distances between the things he climbs or descends, the divisions of the world now extended, now illuminated between the lines, the borders of the intangible now flaring up with darkness, the granular opacities now brightening, the sun biting into the margins of the real, the image dying. 5 Denys, foundation of all cathedrals to come, mentor of naves, stained glass rosettes, of all the gossamer shadow spiderwebbing the light from the East as it rises, Lord of Ionia, oriental Ionas, Denys, Dionysos, your Greek sailing the great hill of Lugdunum, your darkness raining down its alphas, its Alphei, the dawn uncorking the fizz of its dations. John Scotus comments, his violet ink relighting, igniting the world according to Plato, filtering the grit of the flower through the sieve of the eye, the bran, the curds of light, sifting out the clots of theology, in this shadowy cave, the locals burning every log in sight,hoc lignum, a bonfire of stones held in common,lapis iste. 6 And if some hick might ask Quomodo omnia, quae sunt, lumina sunt?