Photo by David Tomaseti on Unsplash
The Long March
Bound on some skillful retreat,
a long march
north and west;
cut off from the rest
we end up foraging
in some scanty orchard,
the two of us.
I said, comrade, it's cold
for this season, bitter,
the wind has frozen
the seed in the plum,
the fruit is stiff
as a clotted heart
my blood beats slow
and the ground beneath my feet
seems to weave and thrust
like the deck of a ship.
Who talks like that,
lost on a long march?
A mouthful of sounding words
fraught with portentous gist;
get rid of it. Forget it.
This is not a time
for gaudy language.
Where are we?
Who knows?
How lost we are,
like Hercules in Seneca
in wild despair
at his battered senses,
his dislocation from insanity.
We walked for days;
not even a crust of bread;
my comrade
failing before my eyes.
At the end of the day
at the end of many days
we lay down to rest
on the cold earth.
What were we doing here?
Lost in our reckoning
lost in our quest.
Without us, oblivious,
the army marches on.
What are two lost
among thousands?
Morning came
and he was dead.
I dug a grave for him
slaving in the hard earth
and buried him
as best I could.
He lies forever forgotten
in a land where nothing grows.
But over his grave
the very flowers of hell
could not grow wilder,
more luxuriant
or more fertile with the life
of the deep earth
than exactly here
at this lonely place.
Red flowers blazing,
red banners waving;
the army marches on.
Palinurus of old,
Aeneas' helmsman,
by a god's spell
fell fast asleep;
overboard he fell
fighting for his life
in the unquiet sea;
days later
washed ashore
shook off the water
and walked forward, thankful,
thinking to be saved,
only to be slaughtered
by rude folk, left unburied
on some foreign shore.
There's more to the story
but forget it.
Was your luck better?
Straight up dead
from hunger and deprivation
dead and buried
there you lie;
no glamour or legend
ringing down the ages,
none at all for that.
Still, in my old age
in this unsteady life
nothing more certain
I remember
than the candle
I light for you,
burn for you
every blessed
passing light-
going year.
Sunday, Sunday
Woke up Sunday,
woke up after dreaming
my fate was bound to fire
like Meleager's
chunk of charred wood,
soon to be burnt out;
my feet felt cold as ice,
the chill rising
as Althaea walked to the hearth,
her heart full of vengeance.
Not much time for reflection
on the dark strokes,
the darker vision,
the harsh visitation
of a troubled night.
Woke up Sunday alone
in a room dark
as a poke;
got myself together
in the warm sun
of the afternoon
went down to the corner
and looked in the saloon;
the place empty and cold,
barren and bright
as a new-built tomb;
no comfort there.
I got the Sunday wearies,
blue as a cop on the beat.
My baby's gone gone gone,
I'm a long way from home
got no gumption in my feet.
Long lonesome roads
beckon like open sesames,
long footweary roads
turning and bending,
black tarry tentacles
from this county seat
stretch out akimbo
to take me nowhere
I want to go.
Look down, look down
these weary roads
you sometime will
need to walk
and think what you lost;
she's gone forever
dead and gone your love
and there's nothing
you or God
or the good green earth
can do to bring her back.
Let the brand be put out
the fire do its worst,
run me out with its embers.
My heart is broken,
I don't care
dead or alive
my time here
the way I was
is over.
Marie
Oh Marie, you are
an aging wreck;
your dangling dugs,
your languid wrinkled Miss Muffet
won't bring the milkman early;
dirty and smelly
slattern of the month,
the epitome of
everybody's discarded laundry.
Lapses in motor function
mental focus
get you to the streetcar
late every day
and late to work;
booted out
sooner or later
when you get home
what will he say?
What a burden
for our pity and revulsion;
you're frightening
in your squalor.
Night and day
a dead soul
an endless round
of apathy and despair,
what kind of life is that?
That's what we think.
But some rare times,
God knows why
somehow roused,
triumphant
between the bed posts
like a shaky marionette
you rise and fall
to the challenge
of bleary marital bliss;
for those few moments
assertive queen,
sweating with your
hirsute timorous king
dismantling him,
cannibalizing him,
you burst forth new-made,
king and queen together,
amorous two-backed beast
before your reign fades away
in the glimmer of tomorrow
and you come apart,
Priapic darling,
again become
what you were.
Alas, Marie, time's more
than a placeholder;
eater, destroyer
changing Nineveh
and all of us to dust;
false fellow traveler
rubbing us out
of our space and place
before we know it.