Spring Equinox
Yet there’s no malice, when you pine alone,
confused and paralyzed into resolve . . .
Can only imagine secrets from yourself,
the wellspring of the buried memory,
what must be for the self to find no solace
in being loved, in loving in return
the man you asked for children, now gone mad
from wondering who you are, as if you know,
who cannot find yourself in anything;
they stand in ruins both, can love revive
the unity that’s natural to them?
Or is some foreign obstacle, some sense
or lack of sense a disconnective force,
making oneself a stranger to oneself,
a stranger that emerges, known to none,
long years of happiness misunderstood,
and lingering where we left them in the fall?
Can anything resolve divided knowledge,
caresses rejected, but not lacking fire,
their proof the mad desire in the eyes,
itself sustaining night, the moon and stars,
as if without them they could not be real?
No reason for her fear can be explained
by anything but being; it’s the same
with he who is her mirror, loving her,
though she can’t see beyond her chosen walls
the impregnating power of the wills.
Does something come to break apart the fall,
make of it winter, something unforseen,
less true, misunderstanding one’s own self,
to lay the glittering ornaments on the shelf,
and close the windowseat one final time?
Is there a something, which is quantified
by touching fingers to a less than being?
Is there at last, itself, an end to seeing?
These questions go unanswered, perplex and linger
as if you had not been yourself at all,
wearing the natural costume of desire
that can’t be met, pacing the parapet
to no end, glorifying death by madness:
they seize desire nothing can snuff out,
because you have not yet been fully born,
but struggle in the womb of vast recall.
I stay with you through sickness, thick and thin,
a ghostly semblance of what I have been,
recovering disparate needs, identities,
that keep us apart, although we are the same,
forgetting history, damaging the heart.
Troubled by not knowing your own secret,
you scrawl a coded message to yourself,
in hidden shadows, you believe conviction,
although belief is falling through the floor,
not true to who you are, who you adore.
I wait then,
scrabbled by insatiable pains,
and watching through the window at the rains
for signs of life, here at the equinox.
“So many bridges crossed, as evening falls…”
So many bridges crossed, as evening falls,
the famous curves which memory preserves,
one God-star of the brick and peopled thralls,
one raindrop radioed to eternity’s walls
in multiple perspectives. Mankind calls
across dusk’s echoing air, the thousand sights
that pass so quickly to our quiet nights,
newspaper, dinner, questioning our rights
to know the world, husbands and wives hurled
up to the stars’ magenta light, such plights
around which every roadside bump is curled.
Know them again! and know them once for all,
the flashing signs, the vacant lots, the sprawl
and pall, precise as individual people.
