Remaining

There’s history and
Then its mystery
And then there comes
a time when
there’s none of it at all,
its wold erased and empty
as this morning’s breeze
which courses nameless
through the hour,
reverent only of air’s
voluptuous slides
from high to lower
scales, ferrying shelves
of wind across a world
not meant for human
ken, devoid of meanings
through robust and still
in its intents. You can
set a poem almost
anywhere in this world:
It fits atop a mainmast
and tucks beneath a
manta’s wing, you can
lodge it on the moon
or squeeze it tight
between a woman’s breasts.
It even sits quite pretty
on nothing’s nada ledge,
out beyond the pale of
bleary poets still droning
on at this hour when
there’s nothing left to say.
Dark so dark outside,
the garden deep in dream,
a few crickets chirring soft
the tide-pools of yesterday’s
heat, a random breeze
reaching this far like
this or that exhausted
wave. There’s nothing more
than these few facts
to name this deadened time.
Not much for a poem.
So why bother writing it
except because the
motion still assures
with faint semblance of
the known, the high
habitual which is
nesting of a sort,
imagined surf and
conceits of ecstasy
to keep me keeping on
right through the
blighted dawn. I made
a promise lives ago
to remain where love
was gone and sing
a river on. That
vow made of my throat
a gout of all I
wished of her --
a dream of plashing blue
which I have come
to call the wash
of depths and dregs of You,
salt master, swoon
inside those eyes
which welcomed me
to desire’s cross and
throne, a bone now
bleached in dark
scalding light and
wearied smooth to stone.
Now the song sounds
empty as the river courses
on, and I wonder what
keeps me here, why I
should try to make
fake waters lie -- as much
reason as the breeze persists
to sieve the atmosphere,
I guess -- one is what
one has become, for better
and for ill. My world
offers not God yet still
I pray to Him (Her/It), receiving
grace in measure to
the depth I welcome it
in willingness and humility
and reverence -- polysyllables
which wreck this poem
yet redeems its words,
comeuppance of the imp
who forks nonsense into
my ear in the form
of pouring bottles and
curved labials, ebbings
of the surf not meant
for human meanings
though this poem tries
in an ambling discourse
far down from the light
of day, like an aquifer
or God’s secret heart
or the waterings of art
where art has sorely failed.
Sometimes an ecstasy,
sometimes a dirge,
always reaching for what
dries upon the page:
That’s the measure
of what remains
& what I can still say
to that blue curved ghost
who sleeps upstairs
inside the rest of my life.