So be it
There is no end.
Even as I gulp down the bitter pills of an unravelling life,
the walking away,
the closing of a door,
the refusal of what could be,
the denial of what has been;
nothing can become nothing.
That birthpang still echoing through my life
may not be stilled
though I stop up my ears
and scream to drown it out.
Yes we can shake hands and say goodbye,
but the cord stretches and still links us
across miles, across centuries,
and as we march in opposite directions
the pull tightens between us
to make us closer in reality
however great the distance.
And my overture to death was another failed attempt
to compose the final page on a continuing story
whose end is not mine to write,
but only to read
and seek unsuccessfully to understand:
I must seek,
and my failure should not dispirit me
for the seeking is the task,
not its completion.
I have lived my life in the conviction
that eventually
one fine day
everything will change
and all tears will be dried up
all conflict ended
in a world turned upside down.
I have put my shoulders to that wheel
which still slips back
and counter-revolution drops us down
to an ugly parody of where we'd been before.
I have tyrannised myself with the conviction
of what ought to be
and missed the promise of what actually is.
Yet growth happens.
I am not the same man
whose angry arms grabbed at I knew not what
and found a universe within the palm of my own hand.
My failed attempt to end it all
changed me
into someone who has to try and learn
that ending is not within my remit:
only to travel, possibly never to arrive,
certainly to gaze around me with astonishment
at how the place I sought to be
is so unlike the heaven I dreamed of:
at the same time greater and lesser
than all my fantasies.
I walk through a land
peopled by strangers
whose arms reach out to become more than strangers.
Yet I may not grasp each one's hand.
It is not given to me to do so.
But when any fingers graze mine
must I not clasp them to me
for however fractionally a moment
before the clock clicks on
and our paths diverge once more?
I cannot hold them past their time
but equally I may not sever the clutch
that has been given to us
to feel another's sweat upon our breasts,
the scent of sweet woodsmoke in our hair
the next day
when all there may seem to be left
are only lonely ashes of the flame we knew.
The song's last line marks just a pause for thought
and the echo sounds on,
ready to be revived at a smell, a face caught in a crowd,
a place where feet walked together out of sync with each other,
a heathered hollow where black flies buzz,
mud tracks where the prints are of feet I do not recognise,
nor cannot deny they might be mine,
as heartbeat quickens,
breath catches,
and tomorrow carries the flavour of a yesterday
never to be forgotten.
I cannot shut the door on what has been
nor yet may I live in anything but the present moment,
uncaught, unique,
never to be repeated,
always here,
never there.
So many questions badger me
but there are no answers:
each truth is half wrong,
each lie contains a grain of reality,
each assurance denies itself,
each certainty a quagmire
oozing up through what feels like solid ground
to soak my knees as I kneel up under a spring sky
whose promise is the only cycle
whose year wheeling round our heads
unites and separates us
even as blossom becomes fruit
and seeds die
to populate another New Year's Day once more.
I cannot tell you where I shall be that day.
I hardly know where I am today.
But being is its own reward.
The joy and – yes – the pain
populates the shape of each day
with faces which fade too slowly
to be forgotten
before their time to go has come.
Must I seek to blot them out?
It would be a blasphemy.
And if their shapes are overlaid
across the images of each new day,
shall I deny the mighty Love
who flashed them into my face
and dazzled me with their radiance
even as the vision faded,
leaving only the memory of the given,
and the never lost?
The tears I weep
are salt with joy
because as tomorrow never comes
so yesterday never dies,
and today contains
my total past as now.
This is all I can give anyone.
Promises are broken as they are made,
or if fulfilled
become something quite different from what was vowed
even as the words die and come true on the quieting air.
As I sit here to write
everything has changed.
I said to you:
Let us erect a real cairn
at the top of the hill
so we can see it as we pass
and others may wonder at who put it there.
Wisely
you denied my plea.
Wind may wither,
sun and frost may crack and shatter,
earth may shift and topple
the little pile of stones
so when we seek for it again
nothing has been left
save perhaps a flattened place in the grass
where insects are repairing what has been damaged by our building.
I tried to demolish
what I thought there was
and found I could not shift a single stone
because each of them was in both our hearts
and as we placed them there together
only together could we take them down
and together we could not.
It is a hard lesson.
I would like to deny all I know to be true
if only to have what I want
but to deny what I am
is the unforgivable sin
the making of which has been taken from me.
I would like to break
the links that tie me together
with all the creatures I have lived and loved
so I could return once more
to the womb where I lay before the big bang of birth made me
this flawed,
wonderful, marvellous,
shameful, atrocious,
unbalanced tightrope walker across the chasms
separating Alpha from Omega,
charting a path where probably none may follow,
except my own astonished eye observing the gift of life
working out its own
miraculous pattern
of found objects
assembled into a collage
whose kaleidoscope shifts and shatters
even as we gaze upon it.
I am a weaver
in a mighty machine-shed
where all the workers are singing
the song of the pattern they make,
never being given to know
what its ultimate shape may be
and only trusting that, one day,
we may gaze into its face
and see
the mirrored image of what we were made
and what we have been making
as the weavers become the woven,
and the pattern becomes the flying shuttle
interlinking all our golden threads together
in a prayer
to which the world echoes a deep Amen.
March 16, 2000
