Phantom 
Don Paterson

         i.m. M. D. 


VI

For one whole year, when I lay down, the eye
looked through my mind uninterruptedly
and I knew a peace like nothing breathing should.
I was the no one that I was in the dark womb.
One night when I was lying in meditation
the I-Am-That-I-Am-Not spoke to me
in silence from its black and ashless blaze
in the voice of Michael Donaghy the poet.
It had lost his lightness and his gentleness
and took on that plain cadence he would use
when he read out from the Iliad or the Táin.

Your eye is no eye but an exit wound.
Mind has fired through you into the world
the way a hired thug might unload his gun
through the silk-lined pocket of his overcoat.
And even yet the dying world maintains
its air of near-hysteric unconcern
like a stateroom on a doomed ship, every
table, chair and trinket nailed in place
against the rising storm of its unbeing.
If only you had known the storm was you.

Once this place was wholly free of you.
Before life there was futureless event
and as the gases cooled and thinned and gathered
time had nothing to regret its passing
and everywhere lay lightly upon space
as daylight in the world's manifest.
Then matter somehow wrenched itself around
to see — or rather just in time to miss —
the infinite laws collapse, and there behold
the perfect niche that had been carved for it.

It made an eye to look at its fine home,
but there, within its home, it saw its death;
and so it made a self to look at death,
and then within the self it saw its death;
and so it made a soul to look at self,
but then within the soul it saw its death;
and so it made a god to look at soul,
and god could not see death within the soul
for god was death. In making death its god
the eye had lost its home in finding it.
We find this everywhere the eye appears.
Were there design, this would have been the flaw.