COMING THIS FAR

 

The hour, early afternoon and vast light rain.

In the solitude of the cabin, shingles

rattling in the slightest gust of damp wind.

It’s still going to be a long Easter day, assessing

silence and everything that can’t stop resurrecting.

It’s strangely alluring because it’s so unavoidable

trying to balance one’s own tips, finding

a temporary but wholly satisfactory “that’s it”,

poking honestly one’s own inner peevish gutter.

The shingles twinkle in the light silver drops.

Among the droplets crowding your heart’s view

and the echoes: “after coming this far what

will you ever do?”

The wave crests, the foam, the crumbling

tigers’ ghosts rolling forward, perpetual Prufrocks

looking for revenge, resurrecting in the trench.

Are we made only of fragments?

Syllables and bodies waiting and then transiting?

Various Vladis and Gogoes sitting on shingles

in a lull in between the rush hour and the night?

With the tree so suddenly blooming into spring?

Blossoms blaring and our hearts, as ever, late

shuffling onward after being stuck on our

cobwebs of crossroads?

Or it’s just a lie, the Golden Age, this

lighting of fools to the dusty all that.

Maybe it has always been like this, the bedraggled

director of the orchestra trying to arrange harmony

out of an improvised accolade of violins

while scrutinizing the canopy of rain at the horizon,

the tigers flaring the longing torches of lost reigns…

oh dear me, dear me…how badly I would like

to get settled in longing, accepting

the twinkling lure from down there,

surfing the Trades, in sleep and prayer.

 

Maybe I already posted this in the past. It's one of those rants in the wake of some voices from past masters, with Vladimir and Estragon in particular in mind, these powerful inventions of Beckett's, the two characters the poem I found in David King's blog brought back to my mind.