a return of Poetry (XII)

into the chasm of time that is my life's commute i drip my words, in obscure piece-driven slow pursuit of meaning eked from these blank, mounding minutes. for years i've missed my deep soul-patrons, they having left me high ashore (or i left them: i'm never sure), but seldom do i miss them more than here.


once or twice i've dreamt the brush of Poetry, shrouded in a gentle face jostled about by the train's foul mob and sway--and i admit she might have been: though always, in the end, i find she's lost amid the crowd.


then again: i've seen her, too, in the dust-shone light of a train coming in underground where we wait for it, we wait for it, checking our watches in a bump-up fight for place against the space-drop down to the tracks below. she's there, in the open volume where the ceiling accomodates the platform above us we rode in--despite the screech and rush, i find her peace in that glowing air. the light belongs to her, as she to all.


--then through the hole. the train plunges out and towards us, a narrow miss, and promises us home. we're carried forth, to the mundane life, poetry in that moment of light left behind: and yet--


at dinner i subdue the imaginations of my day to favor thoughts of the less ideal. i take my meals alone, now, at a mirrored table whose reflections of my face betray the cheap resentment of my frozen loneliness. i never sat alone like this before to eat.


what differences divide, like desolated platform stops, the tracks that string together this exile and entombment? some few, i think: but not decay (which binds the soul before the body starts to go), not idleness, not the dull morbidity of an empty face. we are quite closely dead, we many who are alone.


and yet, we're thus in temperament more than truth. this solitude is a counter-preference, sociality deferred to times that we control. our species does abound, after all: it is my hesitance to meet my neighbors, to greet a woman on the train, that so exiles. this, and theirs to do the same. we live in angles of self-and-else resistance: and so, crowded all alone.


and so at length to sleep, although each passing night i ask the dark what more composes History than time's untiring, vectral thrust. we pile on these many evenings, then find a year is gone; then a decade, then a life; what's more to History, then? yet echoed against the walls i hear the answer spoken in my own voice, and Poetry close beside.








may '11