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  • Sunday Evening
  • Fred Dings

I

“Death is also the thief of beauty,” he says, as a slow disquietude replaces morning’s calm. The pink light fades from ashen clouds, and an icy luminosity begins to wax above the highlands of eternity. The willow, weeping all evening over rocks beside the pond, darkens to an arch hunched above a wafer of sacramental light, a fallen moon too faint to give much sight. There were minds which might have ripened into suns had not the body failed, the nursing vine sallowed and withered before the fruit was ripe. We are flowers of light in a field of darkness, brief in our pulse of generations. We open and close, wax and wane, open and close.

II

Death of the body is not the only death. Our seasons of loss prepare us for the end, the gardens withered in droughts of circumstance, the taut and cold receding lips of love, the glance that lowers and turns away forever, the fires of hope snuffed by the winds of change on the ledges above, the dim glitter of stars in the pond’s eye like distant citadels we’ll never know but we had once lived by. Death of the body is not the only death. A winter mind that never turns to spring has had too much of suffering. Its crystal eyes no longer see the colors of our lives. An empty house collapses under snow in whiteness cleansed of feeling long ago.

III

Where are the stars of death in the pointed night? Is it sacrilege or only emulation to want to be a god? A brazen boy flings against the Goliaths of circumstance, [End Page 263] his sling, a frayed genetic rope he weaves to the furthest nebulae at the end of thought, a human tree whose height might reach eternity. The fire-feathered bird among its branches sings a human song on the edge of space. It beckons through the rocks of time and place. It sings of fire and ice, but not of death. It sings of seasons and dreams, but not of death. An ancient king who lingers on his throne hears its song and dreams of wanderings, of odysseys among the distant stars. [End Page 264]

Fred Dings
Columbia, South Carolina
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