04 June 2013

Night’s Sentinel (rev)

 
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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 sated 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 rose and menaced our skies, a raging
suspension of consensual lives all but passed

into nothing; wise and implausible storms that
calmed hearts in thrall, teased sad wrinkled 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 fast-steeped,
encased in a mould of your liquid embrace where tied

in fine bindings I fuse with the dew from your sleep-used
cheeks, rejoice in the scent of your fragrant hair;
absorbed in still-comfort and reading your skin’s
mercerised signs from the melt of our union –

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; the judging is done, it schemes in the bier, and calamitously so for surely it seems I’ve abused my renewal in your library of dreams.
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 in a dearth 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
without fear re-join your embrace and thrill in the joy of your

awakening 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.
© I.D. Carswell, 1968


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