The Flood

How is it one waits
in the womb sublime
for birth, a mere
forty weeks time,
and so long to die?
Is it really so?
Or is it that the earth
waits with me and you
for either one, of the two
through falls and springs,
past temples and kings,
the atoms and strings.
Such strong forces
and weak forces,
the catastrophes of horses,
treaties and divorces?

These upswept mountains
and overswept seas,
we slept also through these.
The sands that were rocks,
eggs became flocks
and the dust in the clocks,
among these, our sweetest talks

and our boldest lies
take measure of those kinds of cries.
The poet earns a living
from such conscientious giving,
as if to say
we were waiting just for that
one to come,
the last poem,
the final diagram.
Or, the steady beat of the oldest drum.

What happens at the door
between its opening and closing,
a particular history
full of dystrophy,
that thing called decadence,
a bit of tungsten evidence,
rising shining and parting,
forever moments starting.
Without a past or prediction
or any map in this local jurisdiction.
How can anyone go on!
Who decides which blip
charts this lonesome trip
called life, this one,
this only one and you're gone?

A shadow never stays long,
its death never wrong
nor its life very strong,
the short, the long,
the phantom song.
At noon, under the feet,
or near night and so fleet.

Poor wise old shadow,
mark this grave, this body.
You are a wise old shadow,
a terrible reflection
escaping detection
changing direction,
a slight thin projection.

Do you see me too?

Can you write a memory,
weather a storm?
Will you wake up
when I do not?
Or are you just a dream
of a thing designed
a breath of time?
Were you an afterthought?
Which apparition do you look like?
Could you be just the sketch?
An anomaly of light?

A shadow only proves
one thing as it moves,
I am here and tremendously small,
as thin as a ghost
full of vapoury boasts,
the arrogant din
of land-locked men
made of red-brown clay
who are born and die
day to day.
Our shadows explain in words
as they force us to exhume
joy and doom,
the perpetual flux,
skies filled with ducks
and freeways with trucks,
does and bucks,
all of the crux
of an abacas,
the tractatus mathematicus.

The Bull of Heaven dies too.
His shadow leaves.
His parable lives on.
The children in Ceylon
want pencils to draw
everything they saw.
They know as well as us.