north of the future

it would not be here
if you were here.
what is remembered
is love.
---Kenneth Irby.

the soul wreaks of rebellion, vows revenge, and so testifies to a desperate slavery. no thoughts of accommodation. you imagine the north, the tall cedar, the high dragon-clouds, the last day where you find your right name, catch your breath, where reddish ice tinged the reeds, and, at last, you can speak with your own true words to the dead, words of loss and home.

you, walking in the blue, out of the broken circle that is the world, stepping over and through the thicket, brushing past thorn. without belongings, or the crazed-eyes of the possessed and the insane. here time is open-eyed, wooden, and childish. no clocks toll for thee, and the stillness of the dark, the silence of the stars is peaceful. at the frontier you found a new kind of seriousness.

death, the engraver, the laugh of death is hacked in sandstone. how will the hands be strong, how will the heart endure? but prince, poet, philosopher and the pure mind have been cast to one side. and love's corpse stares with a blank-eyed devotion, a blind citation of the past.

at the crossing you were startled, your first movement to turn back, retrace your steps; flinching like an animal it took a while for you to recover your humanity, allow yourself to be riddled with second-thoughts.

yesterday's words ring like a bell in your head: "you're an escape artist", she said, telling it like it is, the platonic truth-teller. but today, in the early hours, the small hours, when your mind is fresh, awakened, clear, piercingly sober, you notice the light struggling to break free from the dust, dispelling the gloom, just as waves break up the murkiness of the sea. you dwell in a land where the unlooked for arises unbidden. you want to record everything you see, note every detail. everything is a witness to your absence and if no turn of phrase will bring you to my side still I, without rank or station, will with all of my black heart perceive you as the clearest of all creatures.

citations: Geoffrey Hill and Robert Lowell.