Even tonight will pass into memory’s
oblivion, doomed despite an ardent
reunion of once estranged yet precisely
matched parts – to a guiltless verdict –
a foregone conclusion.
As you dissolve twice-blessed in a
kaleidoscope of dreams, claimed by
the deep, curdling sands and sink,
absorbed in self-suffusion, I sense
hard-edged awareness balefully
prick, dredging insomnia, haggardly
thick with past phantoms relating the
fates of all vast and antique storms
that ever menaced our skies, a raging
suspension of consensual lives which
all but passed into nothing; wise and
implausible storms that calmed hearts
in thrall, teased wrinkles from sad eyes
before falling easily upon our sore
and thirsting land.
Even tonight will last only as long as
eponymous night can last, decreed
by blindness and a beggar’s mask to
beg in the darkness ahead of the light –
and when it is all said and done,
perpetually follow a transient path
under an old and intransitive sun.
And in the evening’s ritual dying and
before tomorrow’s dawn flies this
night’s unguent shore I am more awake
than trying to sleep, at last alive in glory
steeped, encased in a mould of your liquid
embrace where I fuse with the dew from
your sleep-used face, rejoice in the scent
of your fragrant hair; united in sum and
not caring to part, suborned, a transfusion
of wearing your heart.
Yet I desert you again in a dilettante swoon,
atoning for deeds, bleeding with sins, an
amateur whom while knowing his trial,
self-mutilates in thin pledges and bogus
denial, unable to render or stomach his
fate… I won’t be reborn, it’s too late
and too long to the innocence of dawn
As the light from a new day splits the
anxious night along its softened seams
and spreads a filigree of lucent threads
to gleam in my mired eyes, I am alight;
the clouded cold ebbs to journey’s end
and tangles in the bends of broken sleep,
and though I’ve only strung a line or two
of odds and ends where meaning’s clear
I know I can return from here; night’s
sentinel will wait good-naturedly to place
my fate. I can rejoin your warm embrace,
thrill in the joy of your wakening face;
comforts abide and time has stood still
in a blaze of enlightenment; I know what
is true – as I always will, my comfort is You,
Forever is true; You are as you are,
and You are as I see you.
© 2003, I.D. Carswell
oblivion, doomed despite an ardent
reunion of once estranged yet precisely
matched parts – to a guiltless verdict –
a foregone conclusion.
As you dissolve twice-blessed in a
kaleidoscope of dreams, claimed by
the deep, curdling sands and sink,
absorbed in self-suffusion, I sense
hard-edged awareness balefully
prick, dredging insomnia, haggardly
thick with past phantoms relating the
fates of all vast and antique storms
that ever menaced our skies, a raging
suspension of consensual lives which
all but passed into nothing; wise and
implausible storms that calmed hearts
in thrall, teased wrinkles from sad eyes
before falling easily upon our sore
and thirsting land.
Even tonight will last only as long as
eponymous night can last, decreed
by blindness and a beggar’s mask to
beg in the darkness ahead of the light –
and when it is all said and done,
perpetually follow a transient path
under an old and intransitive sun.
And in the evening’s ritual dying and
before tomorrow’s dawn flies this
night’s unguent shore I am more awake
than trying to sleep, at last alive in glory
steeped, encased in a mould of your liquid
embrace where I fuse with the dew from
your sleep-used face, rejoice in the scent
of your fragrant hair; united in sum and
not caring to part, suborned, a transfusion
of wearing your heart.
Yet I desert you again in a dilettante swoon,
atoning for deeds, bleeding with sins, an
amateur whom while knowing his trial,
self-mutilates in thin pledges and bogus
denial, unable to render or stomach his
fate… I won’t be reborn, it’s too late
and too long to the innocence of dawn
As the light from a new day splits the
anxious night along its softened seams
and spreads a filigree of lucent threads
to gleam in my mired eyes, I am alight;
the clouded cold ebbs to journey’s end
and tangles in the bends of broken sleep,
and though I’ve only strung a line or two
of odds and ends where meaning’s clear
I know I can return from here; night’s
sentinel will wait good-naturedly to place
my fate. I can rejoin your warm embrace,
thrill in the joy of your wakening face;
comforts abide and time has stood still
in a blaze of enlightenment; I know what
is true – as I always will, my comfort is You,
Forever is true; You are as you are,
and You are as I see you.
© 2003, I.D. Carswell
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