L'Ombre Profonde

Lyrics

The mist on the water this morning.
Not white.
The colour of a washed-out photograph from 1922.

I watched your father's fishing boat.
The one with the single blue stripe, peeling at the bow.
It didn't sail away.
It was... absorbed.
Swallowed by the grey between the water and the sky.
There was no wake, no sound.
Just the slow erasure.
A boat-shaped hole in the world.
And then, not even that.
Just the memory of the blue stripe.

This is the feeling.
The deep shadow, l'ombre profonde.
Not the darkness, but the depth it suggests.
A grace you can't point to.
The universe sighing in the space a thing just left.
Yūgen.
The word we don't have for the beauty of what is leaving.

I read that Zeami, on Sado Island,
wrote of this from his exile in the fourteenth century.
Watching the wild geese disappear into the clouds over the sea.
He said the heart alone knows this kind of beauty.
He wasn't watching the birds.
He was watching the vanishing.
The perfect, fading trail.
The elegance of the thing no longer there.

And this is the feeling.
The deep shadow, l'ombre profonde.
Not the darkness, but the depth it suggests.
A grace you can't point to.
The universe sighing in the space a thing just left.
Yūgen.
The word we don't have for the beauty of what is leaving.

It’s in the moss on the stone lantern by the temple gate.
Not the green, but the centuries of quiet it holds inside.
It’s the Noh actor’s sleeve hiding his face for a single, held beat.
What is unseen is more beautiful.
What is unsaid is the whole poem.
A door half-open to a dark room, where the scent of plum blossoms lingers.

The boat is gone.
The water is still.
The mist is everything now.
There is only the feeling.
The depth.