Monday, February 8, 2016

In Memory

Every poem is a vote for the world beyond death,
But there may never be enough votes for success.
The rhyming of history yields the illusion
Of space in that plausible world where everything
Is distinctly different and perishes but most
Distinctions are so minuscule as to seem like
Perfect repetition, rime riche at very least.
Look at this tumbledown hillside of stones, basalt
Cubes all nearly the same, chilly now, long ago
Spilled in fractal-like waves of similarity
Over mesas of nonidentical sand grains
Compacted as monotonous piles of sandstone.

If there's a world out there, it's determined to try
Every infinitely divisible difference
In an endless ringing of trivial changes,
And the endlessness and the triviality
Create death birthed from the never-dead forever,
Create, among deaths, the transient consciousness
Of transience, memory forever mournful,
Forever joyful, forever incorrect. Life
Elaborates the transitoriness of life
And tats every deteriorating fable 
Of what was and therefore, would have to be, what is.
Nothing is like this, the ghost of contradiction.

A soul held two images of a narrative.
In one, a woman sits alone at a window
Looking out on deep woods, winter mountain twilight,
Taking in the evening, none of the home lights on.
In another, a light snake of discrete windows,
A passenger train in the night derails smoothly
From invisible trellises and vanishes
Into the unseen lake under the unseen ice.
A strip of celluloid, somewhere, broken into
Irreducible yes or no bits, held the truth
No soul could remember. There was no evening light,
No image of the doomed passengers in the night.

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