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The first clue was the rifle in the dawn.
A genesis of shrapnel struck the rib
Of my Adam, who cursing forth an Eve,
Kicked in my eyes the dust of endless life.
I’d lived alone that prehistoric age,
The sunstarved place where nightmares come to graze
And man is bound to die before he loves.
A strange agreement signed in others’ blood.
In that the beckoned moment of renewal,
Whose irony alone shall serve to show
That one so loved in life as soon becomes
The object of a tenderless remorse,
I found the shadowed friend whose name is known
To none but those beyond the end of time;
Who know there is no act this side of heaven
To disentangle heroes from their ghosts.
We shepherd through the night such sacred thoughts,
Their novelty unseen by daybroke eyes,
Strikes only ears whose nighttime overflows
With nocturnes, in the key of Rumi’s reeds,
Of separation sung in bloodless voice.
This puzzle, pieced from fragments of a dream
And worshipped as an icon or a saint,
Replaced the cross and euthanized my faith.
This proved the simple truth of what I know:
That Time is just a second-hand device
To gauge the distance round earth’s measured arc.
Such lack of revelation in my thought
Will prove the surest sign this wretched life’s
Been manuscripted by no sacred hand.
I think of all that’s gone, and what remains
Are corpses of the words I never said.
The surest way to infamy is death.
Dying is not just simple loss of life,
Nor by its absence is such life defined.
When there is nothing more than slow demise
Accomplished by a coward’s selfish act
The magic senses constituting being
Are conjured to a senseless denouement.
Love is the blackest art that man divines.
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