Movement III: The Plains of Pure Meaning
Sonnet XI: The Dissolution of the DictionThe shore was made of pulverized diamond,Where concepts bleached beneath a noon-day sun,And every oath and every sacred bond,Into a single, silver thread was spun.The King felt all his predicates undone,His royal titles stripped like autumn leaves,For in this realm, the Many are the One,And Truth is not the web that Fancy weaves.No longer could he hide in grand reprieves,Of flowery trope or ornate periphrase;The desert air, like subtle, holy thieves,Stole the vocabulary of his days.He stood a naked noun upon the waste,Where every former glory was erased.Sonnet XII: The Mirage of the Mother-TongueFar on the shimmering, heat-distorted rim,He saw a city built of golden light,A sanctuary, beckoning to him,To end the labor of his long-drawn night.It promised every poem’s lost delight,The perfect phrase for every phantom fear,A home where syntax was forever right,And every whispered orison was clear.But as the weary traveler drew near,The spires dissolved into a plume of dust;It was a phantom of the inner ear,A projection of his philologic lust.The desert has no room for gilded walls,Nor echoes in its vast, unpeopled halls.Sonnet XIII: The Hermit of the Hushed HexameterHe found a cave of cool and quiet thought,Where sat a sage with eyes of milky glass,Who held a tapestry that he had wrought,From shadows that the drifting clouds would pass."The world," the hermit sighed, "is merely grass,A metaphor for things that cannot be;We are but actors in a tragic farce,Who drown within our own verbosity.Silence is the only prophecy,The only vessel that can hold the soul,Within this void of pure luminositity,Where parts are sacrificed to find the Whole."The King looked down at his own empty palm,And felt the rising of a terrible calm.Sonnet XIV: The Alchemical AphasiaHe tried to speak, but found his throat was barred,By stones of silence, heavy and sublime;His memory of rhetoric was scarred,By the corrosive alchemy of Time.What use was meter, or the ringing rhyme,Against this white and suffocating grace?It was a mountain that he could not climb,A mirror that refused to show his face.He was a cipher in a holy space,A punctuation mark upon the void,Seeking to find a linguistic embrace,In a cathedral that he had destroyed.The King began to weep without a sound,And knelt upon the scorched and holy ground.Sonnet XV: The Appearance of the IneffableThen from the silence grew a sudden chord,A resonance that rattled every bone,More piercing than the sharpest iron sword,More ancient than the first-created stone.It was a voice that spoke in light alone,A spectrum-song that bypassed ear and brain,Seated upon a high and hueless throne,Above the reach of pleasure or of pain."I am the meaning that you sought in vain,The sap within the tree, the salt in sea,The hidden pattern in the falling rain,The 'I Am' of the soul’s geography."The King looked up, his lexicon quite spent,And knew at last what every silence meant.We have reached the midpoint of the journey’s third arc.
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