The Inevitable Twilight Of The Unfocused Eye

    
"Neither of us knew anything that really mattered, nor did we have the ability to rectify that. There was nothing solid we could depend on. We were nearly boundless zeros, just pitiful little beings swept from one kind of oblivion to another."  Sputnik Sweetheart, Haruki Murakami    
 
           
              
This world spread out, before us. Day soaks through, into night. Night melts into day. The air smells of the season, rife with decay. A ripple combs the surface of waters. A wind shoves me aside, then falls still. Leaves murmur overhead, assent, dissent, I cannot understand, or articulate. This world I trod upon, juxtaposed, at times, astride my shoulders, to feel its indiscreet weight, to hear its indifferent presage. I sweat in nameless obscurity, mouthing o’s for woes and syllables, consonants and vowels, carefully sheared into archetypal shapes, for convenience of recognition. Walls I strode, piecemeal in quartered hours, footsteps stitching laterally, seeking purchase upon gilded avenue, in proud minutes, following the tattooed trail of metric glows or even just a sheltered crevasse, when I am leaner, lower, nearer the barrow mounds and their impoverished odors of molecular decay, surfeit of fibers, slouching in a repugnant sigh, gravestone teeth protruding from a carrion stuffed mouth, shocked into a grin of shorn lips, folded arms around knees, ringed in solemn squares amidst the squat and taller sentries, buttressed one upon another in an endless procession of blunt faces, concrete chins and multitudes of opaque eyes, that contain lives, that comprise the cityscape. Black root, soft ocular foliage, locking dust along the hem of vision, that would otherwise impede my gaze through a coat of triple layers, a fibrous tunic, enclosing an all too fragile, vitreous humor, drawn across a discus plane, canals of viscerous antlers, suffused with an objective panoply of patterned colors, the content of which, interpreted subjectively, to an ever inflowing cylindrical river, whispers it’s relayed missive to an envelope of electrics upon electrics, whose leap across synaptic canyons occurs in continuous daredevilry, unbeknownst to the larger continent of me.                
             
               
We stood side by side                
in the middle of              
fermented seasons              
geocentric abstract forms                
of still life              
dirt, water and salt                
ruminations                
as ancient as neolith              
pushing to the edge              
all matters flesh and bone                
bookends of circumspect                
abstractions              
subtracting and adding              
halving years              
a simple equation of                
absolute infinity.              
               
Half of nothing                
in dust and decay                
remains nothing                
without you.              
             
               
My bones fall into lockstep alongside the amblers, long striders and meek shufflers, articulate motion in grates of repetitious gyration, subsonic bursts of vibrato climb through ancillary musculature and mutters of motion rise into a singular keen to descend into substrata, where slow marrow funnels through akratic waters, mindless, heedless, silver quick, carrying an alto on a long held breath as paired sons and daughters dance in a mercurial celebration of death. And of pain. And of change. This gripping catalyst and focusing febrifuge is surely of use to all. As the landscape of my hands callous in a season of labor and soften as I carefully slip my niece’s tiny shoes over her chubby feet. And I remind her of this, and we laugh as I kneel to aid her again, though she’s grown, and only a couple heads shorter than I. Little waif that was, become a woman.              
             
               
Did you think                
I wouldn’t notice              
the shadow in your eyes              
dark as Black Baccara Roses                
on summer solstice under mosaic sky              
when I asked you                
to tell me a story of sacrifice                
leaving middle to the end              
how all celestial beings start as endings              
moving to the light              
I wished to fall backwards                
with gravity of years              
and weight of your love                
through the earth              
weightless.                
               
Half of nothing              
in lightness and darkness              
remains                
nothing without you.              
               
             
For there was time for pain, for change, and for all I’ve had the privilege to know. Time enough for green gilled youth to wax in strength, side by side, back against back, when need arose. Time enough for a fierce embrace beneath moonlight, casting a fresh gloam of blue white upon enfolded forms, indiscriminate and soft, as I slid with the ease of a knife through the flesh of my lover. Time enough to discover purchase of slender fingers upon broad shoulder, to discover the purpose of having grown so tall, as I have. And yes, even time enough for the inevitable twilight of the unfocused eye. Time enough for days to lengthen, wane, and fall into tatters of hushed gray and musts of old, and time for sun to dress all in gold.