The Climate of Loss
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Elsewhere
In this room of minethe joy of finding oneself chosenby the object of my desireslips from one fear into another;the laws that govern usdo not see the fantasy of the endings.Yes, the man walking down the streetknows all about suffering,crying quietly in his cancer.His friends smile in awkward silence.If my suffering is elsewhere,the morning laughs softlyas it enters the pieces of past time,and I write a song and laugh too,thinking desperately to savethe face of the thought I loved.In this very room I knowmy mother pulled her cold shadowfrom her breast, wanting to hide journeysfrom which she had never recovered.And my father kept to his strangeness,in ignorant desire, smellingthe wrinkled sheets in the dark,not knowing what meaning lay in them.My room could be a whole world,and I don’t wish to struggle to keep it.I turn the page; the simple shepherdsstill walk the slopes, and I feeldoors open within me, one by one. [End Page 27] Those altar grounds beyond lie barren,although the blood of human sacrificeis spilled still, a fantasyI don’t have the strength for.I can only leave my shadow to walkthe battlements of this ruined kingdom;a sob is merely caught in my throat.My body speaks with meaningfrom the things that could never happen;it is my own life, Agrippa.In this room I look at itwith the eyes of a polite childhoodbefore time looks out of meand brings back an old tearin which water found itself too oldto belong to the austerity of ice.Maybe I look like I have awakenedin a strange bed. In this roomI could dupe myself with the thoughtthat the world would always be here;but here I go on making my simple mistake,as the yearly rains advance and stop,unable to cross my long closed room.In darkness my feet findthe familiar worn stairs, stiffeningat the stopped clock of painI had told stories of, to myself and others,during my long life elsewhere. [End Page 28]
The Left Side of Life
This life it cherishes grief.Eyes that cannot see, the festivalwhen at last the curtain falls,the bluish weariness of the sky,the friendless kick of the blood-ball.The heart can shut itself offat a knock at the door, but orderdoesn’t cease, and dream coalescesinto the sentence of the closed carbon ring.This life, with the distant cry breaking freefrom a fairy-tale tower, passes bywithout thought, without breath;and here, where I laugh myself sick,was it the real world of the aimless traveler,looking for resemblances and animal fearswhen I was moving awayfrom my impersonal sense of happiness?
Perhaps talking to myself is an answer,when I find I’m suddenly not there;the climate of loss is awful,and looking up mightshow the stars in their magnificence,though a fog hangs on day and night,and the starlight is meaningless becauseit is not enough to find each other again.
This life. Will it help to pluck innocencefrom the wind that threads our daysand force life out of its cage through a back door?It’s not time that gives life its humanitybut a Gulliver of squandered innocence, so at easeto isolate the grinning faceand destroy its surrounding silver trails. [End Page 29]
Late Autumn Afternoon
Snow melts under the rain elsewhere;Elsewhere, too, the wells dry up in the desert countryside.Time has no life,in there only in the courage for a farewellone needs most,or in the hope of the hostage looking upat the sword that will, or will not,behead him;time’s there in the first careful stepthe Taliban jihadi took as he firedat the fourteen-year Malala.
It’s right to saytime does not exist. It’s there simplyto rescue this body that could...
