When nights lie long, and in
their even dark,
An emptiness for light yearns
forth in fallow time
Entreating past enduring
specters of haggard apparitions,
From carking minds, in sweet
forbearance to disembark,
And with them, tedious
passages of flagging and sublime
Dimensions in the measures of
every life's partitions.
At last along horizons breast
dispassionate eastern orbs,
Casting to a mackerel sky
great waves and undulations
In aubergine, with highlights
of deep burgundy,
Worthy alike, of any layman's
or artist's adulations.
Therein lie only
slightest adumbrations (the proof on any
Sunday)
That in the gathering day, the
splaying light absorbs,
Where all of passing time seems
of elsewhere's origin
In light impeccable, cast on
leafy mast of forest floors,
Warms the stirring air, brings
fullness from the earth.
And seeing days and years near
infinite in life's discretion,
We choose our conscience to
ignore, as all humanity implores
For desperate chances, leaving
undone our sacred worth.
And suns deceived us all those
years ago
In warmth that cursed our
callow veins
As though through air in feint
of shimmering mirage,
That all our lives, would as
then, remain forever so
Dreaming in a puerile daze, of
somehow rendered gains,
Never to be realized in all
our lusts or idle badinage.
Those days of rains and suns,
when sensible light
Projected self in fullest
flight and fleeting gamuts
Among the leaves of towering
trees' majestic height,
Or rested on a placid turf, or
such verdant ferns,
As passed the days in
nonchalance by slights and turns,
Were rushed clandestinely, to
some provisional midday summits.
What if we pass, in chance
perambulations, he who had been known
From all those years ago, yet
by such changes as have grown
Would go along unrealized,
until night again comes on,
With loss of cognizance, and
sweetest summers, come and gone
Upon the fickle breeze of
youth's impartial yesterday,
Leaving then, not one
expressive word to him to say.
The ghosts come crowding in
again amid insipid dispositions
With little in residuum for
shield against the shades of yesterday...
Graying granite palisades of
just another cloudy day
Summon contemplations for a
history three score year and more,
Reflecting on our worn and
fading compositions
Compelled to intimate, yet
secret time's entropic door.
In vague and nameless hues of
all these squandered days,
It remains a futile gesture to
conjure any happiness
From out the meager half tints
of these dissected things,
Where is even lost, least hope
of any kindliness.
And to notice minor miracles
in sunlight hardly pays,
The same way we were joyful in
all our youthful springs.
So now have restless seasons
to bloodless autumn turned
With all the webs of living so
meticulously spun.
The strides of wan September,
attired in melancholy,
Echo through protracted hours
of all our sordid folly,
Proclaiming that, much more
harsh, than any lesson learned
When eyes, such as they are,
see larger than our reason.
Jim Hendrix December 2013
