Departure [revised]

[Author Note: I wrote this one year ago today, and decided to give it another look, and try to clean up some of the syntactic and rhythmic issues I had with it the last time I tackled it.]

"He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen."
-- Joyce, Dubliners, "A Little Cloud"

A Departure

I would lay me down tonight

Between two fragments of you —

An accused, apologetic laughter,

Spent by details of your landscape,

That you both crown and crucify me.

I chew my fingers all morning before writing.

In this war of darkened silences,

I assign myself to your sacred fire

And so, I lay me down tonight

[between] two possibilities —

A vision of before and after

Swim in the calm tonight

This love does drown

I kiss you in my thoughts, love

&

suppose the transformations of my selves

sans your dynamic sanctity.

These, stirrings, simulated knots unravelling the patterns;

I do implore these confines

Now

as they penetrate, "recreate,""refold,"

This is my everything, my beginnings, my nows, thens.

 
Reading coffee and smoking poems.

Your laughter, these contingencies, fret and conspire

To murder my blackened souled sons

Like water flowing into lungs,

I'm flowing through these days

I awake at dawn and

Knowing the pain, possessed of your tender joy.

------------------------

Will Evans, October 2007