‘That masterful negation and collapse
Of all that makes me man. . .’ Dream of Gerontius
I am confronted now with the weight of body
and the spirit’s blank, half-willed ascendancy;
in the dark night I wake, uncertain if the sounds I’ve heard
are insinuations from the dead, or smallest creatures scurrying
somewhere between slates and ceiling. Sleep
is not won easily; dreams recur, old arguments, futilities;
vision blurs, perhaps from too much seeing
and memory has become a marshy bog; to you I pray,
Jesus, old fox and clever-paws, old wily-snout, deal
gently with me now. High tide by afternoon, Atlantic
purring like a tom-cat under sun, swollen moment of plenitude
before the turn. The years, taking on themselves
the fortitude of dreams, have been passing swift as dreams; my hair
holds like tufts of fine bog-cotton, skin crinkles
like the gold of gutter-leaves; the ribs of splayed half-deckers
are the days of my well-loved dead cluttering my own low tides;
whether my fall is to be hard or I’m to drift away under white
soft-billowing sails, I would that they could say of me, yes
he lived, and while he lived
he gathered a few, though precious, poems
lacquered with brittle loveliness, like shells.
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