On a brilliant day
I hear her singing
as I search once more
for my beauty...
Above me,
a cloudless haze of sky pulsates
with its thick, sticky waves
of corpulent summer heat,
air creeping around broken edges
of a low stone wall,
now little more than a row of weed-covered rocks
harbouring an ancient hedge,
separating this small alcove of mine
from the pine covered hill rising behind me,
its base edged by this weed-infested patio,
a rectangle of harsh, cracked stones
lying like time-flattened markers.
Remnants of a vagrant past,
left behind when the old house
had blazed and burned to the ground
more than thirty years before,
its ashes long turned to other things,
buried and gone as ordained
by the seemingly perpetual cycles
of birth and death and rebirth.
I have dozed here for almost an hour,
dreaming of the young girl whom I once called beauty,
waiting, waiting for life to resume some testier pace,
waiting, disappointed yet again
because my visions of what should and should not be
are, as ever, shortened by time,
too transparent to assume identity, solidity,
too vague to become more than ephemeral mirages
drifting in the womb-like unreality
that I have sought to know as reality,
as, flirting with the mother of the earth, frustration,
imagining her soft hand in mine,
adapting my thoughts to the assumed but definable stillnesses,
finding myself locked in that euphoric state,
a false nirvana
where everything is part of an easy delight.
I quickly forget other obligations,
not recognizing my lazy selfishness
for what it actually is,
an extension of purposeful lethargy,
purging obligations
with an all too well-practiced sweep
of indulgence
Continuing the dream far longer
than reality might otherwise have permitted
were it to be given its full reign,
its true majestic perch in my scheme of life
were I to allow it to become master and mistress of my fate,
but saying now, damn the obligations, because
it is truly a brilliant day.
And I am here, waiting, waiting,
until the images stir in my mind as they always do,
as she always did,
her thoughts flashing down to my outstretched toes
as I visualized a panorama of universes,
thanking her that I was not really a philosopher,
not having the patience for intensely structured thought,
knowing only that as I lie here in stuffy afternoon closeness.
I smell a gradual change to early evening warmth,
the slight breeze moving across grass,
without my half-closed eyes actually seeing what is changing,
the sun boiling its sky almost clean,
the trees turning a deeper shade of green,
birds floating on up-currents,
pillars of heat rising from the hill above and behind,
ears feeling the distant motion of people, children,
perhaps a girl laughing in that place
where I have been and wandered from,
a place I may never see again,
its grass blown crisp against the mansions;
where I long to be,
where I would go,
that I no longer find.
And having all of it, some of it, or none,
declaring that as my choice I would have only her,
for without her how can I summon fancy as I might,
coming to this place
because every other place is full, or,
more likely, because I have no use for the other places any more,
beauty having deserted me so long ago
that I sometimes forget the long years
I have compared her to the memory of those other places.
She, replying that I had cheated her
of any meaning she might have possessed,
making of her a shallow creature
with as little substance as any other of my dreams,
and not wanting my company any longer, departed,
leaving me stretched in the hopeless burning afternoon,
the realization that nothing so absolute can readily be altered,
that beauty herself whom I had given the proportions and disposition
of a young and slender-hipped woman,
with long, dark hair and delicately laced bosom,
nipples like acorns,
eyes the colour of the sky,
skin like silk,
clothing as transparent as a dragonfly’s wing.
This beauty, this once-imagined love,
who has left me tumescent and alone,
not sharing my desire but tearing it instead
from the very roots of all I have fashioned,
shattering my house of glass as if it had not existed,
which of course it had not
except in the eye of my own mind, my own fantasy,
where dwells all manner of other fiction as well,
all the while trying to tell myself
that I am not obliged to believe any of this,
or even that there ever was such a thing as beauty
in the first place,
though I think there must have been.
I lie here alone in the not unpleasant euphoria of daydream,
listening, waiting, waiting,
feeling nothing other than what is mine,
that which I have succeeded in re-creating,
my own images of her,
mine to cherish and behold,
how I would have her,
no other way.
Those wine-red lips to kiss,
thighs like gentle pillows,
the sun warm on our backs,
her hair covered with leaves,
falling across my face and eyes,
reminding me as she did
that we could never agree
as to what might be beautiful in the first place,
that it was not her intention to be anything
I might imagine,
but rather to be her own vision,
her own being,
that which she chose to be at the time,
taking and giving only for the moment,
nothing more, nothing less,
as everything, and nothing,
truth and beauty
in a shimmering gown of pixie lace and heat haze,
flecks of dust sliding mysteriously
across the surface of my eyes,
blinking themselves away,
the tears real,
my heart in my hand,
crying out after her...
She, laughing in the ashes of another noon’s night,
while beyond the old house
a blackbird settles onto the stone wall,
insects march across the dead patio,
the crescendo of the child’s laughter fades as it echoes,
my hollow words not quite reaching her
across the spaces between as she turns.
Running down the rows of weedy stones,
a ghost who will no longer materialize,
beauty sings her unearthly song
as the shadows of the day fade.
On a brilliant day
I hear her singing
as I search once more
for my beauty...
