Refractions of a Loss

To my friends across the sea,

Continents of rugged ground,

You send a pile of poetry

And it’s glass that has been ground

In pain and sorrow, grief and death.

Glass grinds into my eyes

And the tears cannot melt

The lump in my throat

Or sentimental sighs

In some romantic note,

Not when it’s news of death.

I too know the sudden lapse,

The loss of consciousness,

The darkness all around,

But each time, at the abyss,

It has withdrawn back to its source

Somewhere underground,

The intimations of impending death.

Your letter startles me,

Your poetry shatters my illusions,

Your losses knock me to the ground.

Not only can I no longer see

The world as once I did

Through dreams of immortality,

But I have hid

Those voices prompting;

For I am deaf,

And watch your gestures

Wildly waving

With wilder eyes.

No one matures

Into a wiser man

Or understands

The old necessities

Unless the sound

Of broken glass

Infuses sparks of doubt

And double bound

Tumbles through the prison grate

A lens, a lance,

A blinding ray

Diffused, diffracted,

An orblute refracted round the deceptive towers of a Spanish castle

Or a will’o’the wisp skipping through the deep morass of memory

In search of time long lost,

Some place to rest and insert

Its store of pain and humiliation.

In the middle of a perfectly dark and peaceful sleep

My eyes pry themselves apart and stare

Into the night searching for the red lines

Of an electric clock to reassure me

That blindness and death have not come yet

And I struggle to hear some sound

And to touch some familiar thing.

When reassured for the moment,

I fear to close myself inside myself again

And try to read until my eyes grow heavy,

my mind resigns itself to dumbness

and the possibility of oblivion.

Old books do not deal with the impossible dangers

Of our modern world, their worries

And their fears seem distant possibilities,

And what was most excruciating

Has already come to pass—

Wars, famines, genocide.

Through the broken lenses of my time machine

I see fragmented nightmares

And can live with them one piece at a time.

But then, beyond expectation,

A little dog I came to like,

A three-legged mutt named Sam,

A jolly little person,

The only animal I have liked in ages,

Was mauled to pieces by a neighbor’s beast.

The world is once again at the precipice,

More than in Egypt, Syria and Iran,

So that archaic novels no longer comfort

And only my own childish memories

Purged of seriousness bring sleep.