Stuck.
A small desire
(coffee, maybe pastry)
A Herculean labor.
Such histrionics,
A drama worthy of greatness,
And I, jet-lagged, ordinary at best,
Blindly stabbing.
Yet, it arrives:
Mousse au chocolat
Crème brûlée
Je n’sais quoi
And coffee,
A small, unassuming demi-tasse,
Ordnance as yet
Unexploded.
I spoke in riddles
Indecipherable even to myself
Especially myself
All these words made real
Made manifest
In the beginning
–It said —
Was the word
Indefinable useless
A meaningless jumble of
Sound unless
That hunger not yours but mine
Is the meaning of all of it
Or the infinite cosmos
Of conscious beings
Until the face in the mirror
Sweeps past me into the distance
Unable at last
To recognize the original
I always thought I was some kind of Gypsy
Racing from edge to edge
Never stopping never asking
Weariness my goad and my goal
All will good or bad
Known and unknown
As deep and suspicious
As an autumn breeze in April
Where is it exactly you want to go?
Don’t you know all places are the same?
All contain your ghosts
The dead can’t help you
Any more than the living
You are yours alone
I lived riddles
Myself indecipherable
Especially myself
Light streams in, cold as stars
At midnight
You feel the deepest humming
Of the universe
The unguessed throb of its
Unraveling
A star collapses
A photon flies into a black hole
A moon pulls itself apart
Planets spin and collide
And our lives stream outward
To unknown ends
I.
In the garden
An old man rakes gravel
Leaves oblivious
II.
Time is not a river
It is an ocean of many currents
Give me a raft to sail on
III.
We are sparrows, you and I,
And all the rest of them, too,
Picking at life’s slab of suet
Did they sing to us, too,
These poets of the young and wistful,
Of the just discovered?
Were we, too, so fast conjoined
In giddy possibility?
Are we now consigned to a coarser reality?
Because a thing becomes familiar
Must it become less beautiful?
Time is a joke poorly told.
An old color photograph,
Its blazing reds and excruciating blues
Reduced to jaundiced dim browns,
Still cuts deep
Through all fog and wishing,
Blinding in its fierceness.
exiles child 