Metempsychosis
When I am old, and can no longer walk,
And can no longer climb my favored ways,
My eyes will ride the wing of brother hawk,
To see my name in clouds of white and gray.
When time itself grows gray, and I am blind,
And can no longer see what lies ahead,
I’ll lean upon the days that lie behind,
And hear their whispered tales of gold and red.
When I’m immune to time and sound and sight,
When ash and bone are all that’s left of me,
My spirit will be air, and wind, and light,
Destined for another chance to be.
Perhaps next time I’ll be a flying thing—
A hawk, an old man’s eyes upon my wing.
Apodosis
Prophets new, old fears—
apocalypse or tales apocryphal—
from whatever starting place,
the years, like droplets
pulled by slithered tides, slip
gracelessly toward kingdom come.
Blurred, each year is mangled by the next,
limps away, beneath a browning sun,
a gallows for its crooked cane.
Wrecked, the fool and king interred
as one, the priests are buried with the pimps.
Fame, disgraced, drowns in the shallows.
For all that’s past is lost,
walled within a vault of days,
placed with other bothered centuries.
Tossed like scraps upon the floor,
praise and valor lie unrecalled,
urgencies forgotten or erased.
The universe, with drooling smile,
reviews the manic, marching years.
Their lines will form a thousand times
while men, adrift, crawl perversely
to their fears and wait for news
of crimes that pose as prayers.
The dead speak only to the dumb.
Rocks re-seal old tombs, so that
we raise our new gods up with rope.
Numb and ignorant, we dread
what waits and grins behind the clock—
hope, or just the end of days.
Reprise
"Hieronymo’s mad againe."
—T.S. Eliot, “The Waste Land”
Over and over you hear her
combing the world through her hair,
muttering the long day’s shimmer,
everyone else condemned, subsiding
separately, in waiting.
She leads you past the scattered flowers
and bones, to where the pikes are set
into the ground, a hundred yards from heaven.
Avert your eyes. Ignore the crows.
First this she says, then that.
So you pretend you cannot feel the chafe
of chains, the all-seeing push of silence.
Forget the pinch of borrowed shoes,
the clutch of bartered earth.
She will remind you. You will remember.
Let the phone ring. Don’t stand by the window.
All is moving fast, away from you. Legs lost,
names broken, sift through your box of chances.
Outside, toothless limping history is going
door to door, someone’s picture in its hand.
