In the Distance

In the distance I saw

a girl, slim and small, green eyes

and braided hair.

And I loved her then,

maybe I didn’t know it,

but my bones did, and my eyes

(my mind is always last to know).

She was in the distance, across

a large room,

dressed in a light turquoise dress

and white shoes

Eventually, reckless and anxious,

I asked her out in muttered stages:

“Do you know who I am?”

“Do you find me radically offensive?”

“Will you go out with me?”

She answered:

“Yes.”

“No.”

and “How old are you?”

Then, relieved and suave

(as I thought),

I answered:

“I’m not as old as I am.”

Yes, that was nonsense,

but as is often true in the times of

crucial experiment in our lives,

we bridge from one understanding

of who we are to another via some paradox

or other, some unintended piece of prophecy.

For indeed I am not as old as I am still,

just as I wasn’t then, in the distance of the past,

and the woman whose life interpenetrates mine,

who is as much the author and finisher of all I have done

as I am, synergistically, my lover and fellow-worker,

has lived with me, and lived with me, for these many years.

I still stand before her as I did then, hat in hand,

overcoated against the world, flustered and inarticulate,

lost and found in the distance of my own thoughts, talking

nonsense when I should be not be talking;

but, as she did then, she smiles at my mumuration, and now bids me back

to her, to all that we have been and are and shall be together,

as it all trisects the present

Today

I recall the advent of her

in the distance

I read out some of my poetry tonight at The Gnu’s Room. Here’s a recording. Unfortunately, I forgot to hit ‘record’ until a couple of sentences into a passage from Dylan Thomas I used as preface.

Link (A .caf file–you’ll need QuickTime Player or some such)

On the Eve of the End

On the eve of the end, the Mayan-made end of all things

I sit and drink coffee, writing and reading, unwilling to meet coming darkness sleepy with unmarked pages

On the eve of the end, the Mayan-made end of all things

I sit and worry about whether I should worry, scarring my final hours with wide-awake meta-worry

On the eve of the end, the Mayan-made end of all things

I sit and notice that no one seems too worried really, unable to see the dark comet hurtling at us

invisible, uncoated with ice and stone, heaven’s stealth weapon

On the eve of the end, the Mayan-made end of all things

I sit and wonder if I shouldn’t have outgrown my Mayan stage in junior high, counting vigesimally

–we are at about 5 in our countdown from 20 to nothing-at-all, a real zero

On the eve of the end, the Mayan-made end of all things

I sit and ponder Max Stirner, who set his cause on nothing, and consider what he would have thought

since both his ego and his own, and all the hell else, are about to be naughted, regardless

of whether they are naughty or nice (A Christmas Apocalypse, Dec 21)

“I have been so naughted in Thy Love’s existence that my nonexistence is a thousand times sweeter than my existence.” Rumi said that, and I have stood in his place and looked up at

his turquoise dome beneath the azure Turkish sky, the latter about to darken and the former about

to fall

On the eve of the end, the Mayan-made end of all things

I sit, and I wait, and I expect

nothing