Even tonight will pass into memorys oblivion,
doomed, despite an ardent reunion
of once estranged yet precisely matched parts,
to a guiltless verdict a foregone conclusion.
As you dissolve twice-blessed
in a kaleidoscope of dreams,
claimed by the deep, curdling sands
and sink, absorbed in sated self-suffusion,
I sense hard-edged awareness balefully prick,
dredging insomnia, haggardly thick with past phantoms
relating the fates of all vast and antique storms
that ever rose and menaced our skies, a raging
suspension of consensual lives which all but passed
into nothing; wise and implausible storms that calmed
hearts in thrall, teased sad wrinkled eyes before falling
easily upon our sore and thirsting land.
Even tonight will last only as long
as eponymous night can last, decreed
by blindness and a beggars mask to beg
in the darkness ahead of the light - and
when it is all said and done, perpetually
follow a transient path
under an old and intransitive sun.
And in the evenings ritual dying and before tomorrows dawn flies
this nights unguent shore I am more awake than trying to sleep,
at last alive in glory, fast-steeped, encased in a mould
of your liquid embrace where tied in fine bondings I fuse
with the dew from your sleep-used cheeks, rejoice in the scent
of your fragrant hair; absorbed in still-comfort and reading your skins
mercerised signs from the melt of our union united in sum
and not caring to part, suborned, a transfusion of wearing your heart.
Yet I desert you again in a dilettante swoon, atoning for deeds,
bleeding with sins, an amateur whom while knowing his trial,
self-mutilates in thin pledges and bogus denial,
unable to render or stomach his fate
I wont be reborn, its too late
and too long to the innocence of dawn; the judging is done, it schemes
in the bier, and calamitously so for surely it seems
Ive abused my renewal in your library of dreams.
As the light from a new day splits the anxious night
along its softened seams and spreads a filigree
of lucent threads to gleam in my mired eyes,
I am alight; the clouded cold ebbs to journeys end
and tangles in the bends of broken sleep,
and though Ive only strung a line or two
in a dearth of odds and ends where meanings clear
I know I can return from here; nights sentinel will wait
good-naturedly to place my fate. I can without fear
rejoin your embrace and thrill in the joy of your awakening face;
comforts abide and time has stood still in a blaze of enlightenment;
I know what is true as I always will, my comfort is You,
Forever is true, You are as you are, and You are as I see you.
© I.D. Carswell
