In twilights gone
Truth fades like some
Antique paint, unsuited
To the impatient light
We deal with nowadays.
Still, a window
Is a window.
In the unscrubbed mirror: Nurmuiž manor
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Tag Archives: endings
In the unscrubbed mirror: Mannequin
This is the first of a series of short poems inspired by photographs I have taken over the years in Latvia.
Zigrida, your arms
Used to embrace me.
Now you watch
From your upstairs window
As I pass below,
As the long parade
Passes below.
In your dream,
Things are surely different.
The divine complaint
It’s easy for you,
A few winters’ discontent,
A bad summer
Here or there
Was that a tragic
Bend of history
You just navigated?
Those graveyards
Groaning with corpses,
Will soon be paved over.
Those shrieks will die away
Like the souls who bled them.
Even those eyes,
Those eyes, you won’t remember.
Do you find it difficult
To contemplate
The misery of your love,
My love?
You will die.
I will not.
The angel’s swift
The angel’s swift kick sent you reeling
Into the churchyard – it was your time
Though you yelped in surprise.
Was that you, slipping through the gate?
I couldn’t tell,
For the tears in my eyes.
One sudden morning
One sudden morning, as the sun sprang gayly
Slung across the day
And the breeze teased the slithery waters
And crowned the trees with whispers
I slipped the irons of time.
The child grandfathered the world
Through my heart, and I saw the true meaning
Of love beyond mentioning, of life unsheathed.
I saw the fringe of being, the birthplace
Of torment and gain, hand in hand in hand.
Awash in that speck of reality
That illusion casts in the eye,
Was unbending everness, all in gale and garnet,
In anguish above and below
That which eludes the grasp.
A wisp of this and that,
And great epics are written
In groaning slabs of rock, in ecstatic wandering
Through surges of joy and despair
All identically kitted out.
Whether we arrive here or there
Means nothing, after all;
That was the secret that escapes always.
In the beginning was the word
And the word was not.
exiles child 