The Dark Path

A shade of yellow, that once stood opaque
in the rainbow of each glitzy morning,
now became translucent, as if the sun
broke against his own window....

I must tell you
how he managed as the lights went slowly out
to look inside the top glow of each object
and make in his mind a spectrum of inner
texture, of an essence isolate from the
nervous trembling of things struck by light.
---Marvin Bell

How sad we are together!
On the walls-flowers and birds
Are languishing on clouds
The windows are boarded up forever
What is out there-frost or storm?
---Anna

..[b]efore the metal shaving mirrors
and see the shaky future grow familiar
We are all old-timers
each of us holds a locked razor...
---Lowell.

b, locked in, a life in parenthesis. K, open, out-reaching, crooked. Grammars of the soul: asking too many questions, Bulleh and Augustine became questions to themselves. And you?

I am as one coarsened by feckless grief

Storm cloud and sun together bring out the

yellow of stone.

Why is yellow the saddest colour on earth? Isn't that what you asked in your oblique way?

We do not care if this has been the century of departures, or emigrations, only your own, your own black path out of here, is of any concern to you, for we, wir negativen, have found a lonely road, and stumble without guidance or an inheritance..I say we out of politeness...

Night falls. Our faces darkened with meditative thoughts and strange premonitions. Lord, you make us blind to ourselves. And this is a blessing-we are told. Distance is the soul of beauty. You want everything to fall, to be lost, so that you can reach out your hand, or someone can, in your name. But you have forgotten, or maybe you could never have known: if you walk on a path for too long you forget that it is a path, or where you are going. Sadness slows us down.

Age is our acceptance of dullness. I've forgotten your face. I should have painted it in my heart and become an infidel. But now it only shimmers, as if infinitely distant, like the reflection of the pale moon on a stream. And I, like a drunk Li Po, want to drown myself in it. And now I think to myself: you were impossible, and perhaps this dark path wasn't a path after all. It was the light from within that failed...