Sunday, March 15, 2009

Рукописи не горят

Damn it all.
Some minor phrase
Some glint of eye
Some perfectly
inconsequential
gesture
And I'm gone.

Not Memory Lane, no.
Not for me is so tranquil a metaphor.

Desirée I should never have come

Instead I face memory's dark maw,
Some Calcuttan oubliette
In which, safeguarded by purple prose,
Those most poignant fragments of the past reside.
Here, like Alice, I fall.
Hands clenched, teeth grit.
That eternal paradox that so enlivens
The masochistic duality of repression and remembrance.

To flirt with rescue

Unlike Alice, there is nothing curious here.
Here all is familiar,
Achingly familiar.
Each shattered minim contains,
Like a personal portraitured hologram,
An infinite number of recursions.
The sound, the memory
The touch, the memory
The eyes, the memory.
The agony and the ecstasy
The horror and the weeping joys
The remembrance of scent,
Of sound and taste and touch
The senses did dutifully record
Each moment
Of You and I
Of Her and I
Of Him and I
And Her again

When one has no intention

Each one is a case for tears.
Each one is a case for laughter.
When we get down to cases
As I so often do
Perhaps we might have...
If we but could of...
Perchance...

So long as I remember that I am mad
I have the strength to live the lie that I am sane.

Of being saved

Would Pyrrhus
Had he been given world enough and time,
To reach his old age-
Would he have returned to Asculum
And searched for some sign
That there had been achievement?
(This I ask myself,
without much need of an answer).
It is a not a question of concern.
It is but a styling of pretense-
A falsehood said in hope of sounding deep.

And with a start, I remember that this is not the time
To wallow in my own self-loathing.
I have work to do,
Things to do,
Tasks to achieve.
And so I drag myself back into the real world,
The one less preferred,
Where you and her no longer are.

Please try to forgive me.

Sometimes I sing.
Sometimes I lose myself in the clustered words
The recurring lines
And simple themes
Of patter songs.
So I go on.
And patiently wait
For when the next trigger might return
My masochistic self
To faded past
and Better Days.

Ἂν ἔτι μίαν μάχην νικήσωμεν, ἀπολώλαμεν.

3 comments:

Jerry Prager said...

You okay son ?
Dark broodings and now you're ill.

Jerry Prager said...

Is this Papa's upcoming death anniversary gloom ?

Jerry Prager said...

Back again to find myself somewhere between Ezra Pound's classical minutiae and some existential crisis, the attempt to give voice and the hiding of the voice, by not saying, a whole lot going on, but so much of it intentionally unclear.