"It is said an Eastern monarch once charged his wise men to invent him a sentence to be ever in view, and which should be true and appropriate in all times and situations. They presented him the words: "And this, too, shall pass away.""~ Abraham Lincoln
We ask the same questions
And receive the same answers;
The spirit always the same
The wording always different
The same picture perceived
But as a puzzle fills
In only as the riffs in the sea allow
So does our perception drift upon
The waves of table cloth and canvas
Similar are we to children playing Atlas,
Holding the world as fingers feel fit,
If only to kneel and see our
Sky dissolve into an azure pane
Where cloth and canvas are too much the same.
Thus the piece does not fit.
We draw back idol fingers; we quit.
The water and the sky are too much the
Same;
Our small minds only see prettily
Till the horrific rips wide sleepy eyes;
What was one becomes two.
(Oh if only then we knew)
II.
We return on a snowy night in April
To a closet of Blankets and Boardgames
And we set next to the windowpane
That very puzzle that always left a complaint.
The seasons pass, the white hairs grow
The cabinets become clogged and
A wintered wife’s complaint drags into a row
A crisis we all know
Though seldom see.
“ This needs a closet cleaning!
This needs a reawakening!”
Her spirit translates
What her words relate.
And as the pushbrooms and gloves
Come upon the hands, the hearts of these two loaves,
And as the mothballs roll down the hall
As they fall from an upturned broomsweep
Of cobwebs (nature’s crow’s feet)
And as the women who is bent bends to
A Sky beneath the cabinet filled for tea,
She picks up the Blue puzzle piece
And sees an abysmal repeat of whence
She was young; straight; when all seemed
At peace.
“Stop that racket”
And the Husband stopped
His ‘crack clack cracking’
And turned to see eyes aglow
That he scarcely remembered;
As if he’d never known.
“Where is the puzzle that fits this piece?”
“Oh throw it away Suzanna! We don’t need
Another game at the age in the least!”
“But I do need the absolution!
I need the freedom,
I need to know how these
Edges meet in a crease!”
(“For my own skin is a parchment
Fading fast, a simple portal
That holds nothing immortal
I’m a dead bag of bones
That is stuck in her old house.
Oh! How this home feels so alone!")
To her stature the old man cowers.
She has Spent her Spine to that of a Serpent,
And a simile would seem him to her prey,
He himself knelt upon knobbly knees;
A prey in prayer,
Oh man in this dream;
Especially this old horse in his
Nightmare.
To awake the new in the Old
Is the only thing we know,
The only thing we knew.
And what we see as children
Shall our mind see again
When the sky and sea fall apart
If only to de-scene-agrate.
……..
When a picture become whole
A hole rips wide and our eyes
See again, as before the dim
-But with the dim-
(Where the desolation and
condensation
Are two but one.)
Nevertheless this is a wordy
Regression,
And though the spirit,
Our spirit learns the lesson,
Our eyes must return to the
Present for its present.
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