Friday, August 10, 2018

The Abyss of These Days

        Silhouette of Christina Grimmie (1994-2016). Still frame from video for Stay With Me.

The Abyss of These Days

Another of these days has come.
Regular like moons they come
to mark the margin at the edge
where time plunges into a sudden gaping abyss.
It is the end, the unknown;
the implacable, all-consuming fire;
or something else,
beyond the abyss of these days.

All around me are sights and sounds,
glowing icons of life. They hold
eyes, breath, hanging hair,
swift fingers, a voice
all gathered to intense focus
by agile awareness of mind and heart, as if
a new world is about to be created.

All held in glowing visions.
Are they dreams or beginnings?

When these marked days dawn,
my ears awaken to ringing bells.
Such song as I have never known,
as though I could fly and soar on the drafts of its resonant air.

But then, a swift thunder cracks the whole sky open,
and in the oxygen-abandoned atmosphere a silence falls.
It carries me down,
and buries me in its dark soil...
a silence full of memory.
An aching silence of waiting.

And I am made deaf by stark silence boring holes through my head.
I am losing my mind in these days, these centuries,
these aeons of waiting in cold black earth without a sound.

These days are so long that I forget what I am waiting for.

But your face...I remember your face, your singular face.
I cannot forget the face that made me feel the shape of my own soul.
That face stirs a sweet fierce pain inside me,
a force deeper in me than my own life
that squeezes my heart inside my chest.

And I remember that I am only fragments of myself
waiting to be put together,
waiting for eyes that can see your face,
waiting to dance and sing in the bright fires
beyond the abyss of these days.