In the commerce of faces,
one law: the image fades
inward from its edges.
The end of the image
is eyes.
Willy-nilly strangers
begin, they transact a gaze
and are bound by its terms,
the border between them
negotiates down
to the thinnest filament
that would withstand
trespass. The end
is eyes.
Let us begin again.
Our terms already set,
let us now together tend
to the one task left.
Today I offer my palms
to dead lands and muted
streets before death seams
my eyelids, sews me
in the skin of all the earth
and sleeps forever in my hands.
Breathless, we flung us on the windy hill,
Laughed in the sun, and kissed the lovely grass.
You said, “Through glory and ecstasy we pass;
Wind, sun, and earth remain, the birds sing still,
When we are old, are old. . . .” “And when we die
All’s over that is ours; and life burns on
Through other lovers, other lips,” said I,
—”Heart of my heart, our heaven is now, is won!”
“We are Earth’s best, that learnt her lesson here.
Life is our cry. We have kept the faith!” we said;
“We shall go down with unreluctant tread
Rose-crowned into the darkness!” . . . Proud we were,
And laughed, that had such brave true things to say.
—And then you suddenly cried, and turned away.
The phenomenon of déjà vu has often been described. Is the term really apt? Shouldn’t we rather speak of events which affect us like an echo–one awakened by a sound that seems to have issued from the darkness of past life? By the same token, the shock with which a moment enters our consciousness as if already lived through tends to strike us in the form of a sound. It is a word, a rustling or knocking, that is endowed with the power to call us unexpectedly into the cool sepulcher of the past, from whose vault the present seems to resound only as an echo. Strange that no one has yet inquired into the counterpart of this transport–namely, the shock with which a word makes us pull up short, like a muff that someone has forgotten in our room. Just as the latter points us to a stranger who was on the premises, so there are words or pauses pointing us to that invisible stranger–the future–which forgot them at our place.
freedom has overtaken me I
had run ahead of it for years
along an interesting
but narrow road obeyed at least
half the rules imposed by
lovers children a house a
political position now out
of breath probably I’m stuck
freedom has hold of my jacket
won’t let go I am alone
I’m a DC-based poet interested in the possibilities for poems in the new media. My other interests include monsters, photography, music, green things without heads, mathematics, cinema, and free pondering. Welcome to golempoem.
