Come and Gone

                           

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