To an Enameler

Touched by some immortal touch of hope and despair,

who would not leave the common continent

to sail the heart’s dark seas

that roll forever toward Byzantium?

Hesitantly murmuring doubt and insecurity

you sift ground glass upon a copper butterfly,

then unafraid give it to the harsh miracle of fire.

And a new creature wings into those Eastern gardens

of prismatic light,

swirling in patterns wrought to eternal motion,

indestructible, unspent

under Apollo’s sun.

I watch your strong hands, deft and wise,

limning in exquisite surety

the interplaying colors of each light

and hear your uncertain lips questioning to shadow

each such strenuous expense of being.

You doubt your essence, who grow butterflies?

Turning again now, you sift and kiln

a green-golden fish whose black back

challenges the night with its own night,

the while you tentatively say

shy warning about my emerging shape of soul.

So tenuous, so oblique the image

that I must pause before I see it:

the quick, arching dolphin that leaps toward light

and lapses back into the dark waves of retreat.

It is (I grasp now) your honesty—

aware, uninnocent, scrupulously fallible—

that we must not betray

under the silence of abeyant stars.

Precarious, it is not brittle;

poised, it does not break

as sometimes break the tinsel steps of porcelain people

walking the narrow, credulous city streets,

dreading man’s capacity to doubt.

Your butterfly’s and dolphin’s copper bones support the light

dancing, glancing through rainbow glass.

So it is your questioning too,

like the sea’s murmur and the muttering wind,

that supports dolphins through perilous deeps

or flutters new wings over golden palaces

and brings them into the luminous eternal gardens

of Byzantium.