THREE WARM EVENINGS IN A ROW

Three warm evenings in a row

I’ve sat out here to toast my toes

and await the advent of a constant muse;

to no avail: in each such case, my eyes have

flickered, closed, reopened, all involuntarily

and in random order, my body telling me that

sleep has prior claim – certainly where

its opponent has no gentle voice or lullaby

to propagate inchoate alibis that I might hide and

later call to mind and populate to save me from

the ache of my own brand of daybreak dreaming.

 

I have learned that nothing is forever,

even fifty years of pleasures taken and

just as many given or forsaken;

and so conclude that, looking back –

yes, further, right to the back – nothing can be

gainsaid, nothing reversed, nothing that might have

caused the hearse transporting father, say,

to accelerate back out of the cemetery

in search for a more opportune moment

to discharge its load – at least nothing worse

than the odd sliver of nagging regret that could be

convincingly, conclusively, repeat-after-me said

was wrongly ignored, left under the bed.

 

And nothing changes now; now that I

say and do and am much that I would have feared

if pushed just gently towards my own misty end.

What would I be if these things had been confined to dreams?

How could I meet the eyes of one who has not yet

turned his face to mine? Thus I should have reeled,

essentially blind; thus not yet at peace when

the long sleep might have tapped on my door,

unconditioned by a life allowed to grow like a garden.

But it would have been condition enough, and more,

to adorn a field corner for some successive springs

with a thousand sweet poppies that together would sing

a lament for the long-gone; but still each would weep

its own scarlet shroud for one of the fallen,

seeping deep to his bones, proud, unforgotten.