sw00831v-40.poem38

Venturings



 Commencement


Still must I contend with vanity, and lose.
For certain matters matter past all will,
And though a poet would desire to die
In purer worlds and there renew his life,
The paradox reverses in its time.
So days like this bring scratchings on a page
With more important scribblings of mistakes,
What then?  But questions are irrelevant,
The patron says.  And so this little frame
Sweats out its dusty task and cultivates
A desert for his race, and so this youth
Expends some thousand minutes swinging blanks
Against a vaporous crowd; and so, at last, 
He really dies (his brothers will not miss
Him though a few may hang his picture on
Their inner walls); yet there's the patron, friend,
And even if I were an angel low
There'd be a ceiling to repair, a cell
Which I could not escape but by a hard
And satisfactory epic sky and cramps
An old marine would rather not recall.
But I procrastinate, as all our pseud-
O intellectuals say.  I must begin.

Four years for most; still, nothing has an end,
And we are what we make and what makes us;
And if our senses slice through every realm
Or every realm attacks and slashes them,
Those days that rolled the snow across our eyes
Or dropped the sun a certain million miles
Are both our gain and never once our loss.
How I despise these platitudes I raise
Though they may well be truer than we feel
(A spider's web could say as much; perhaps
Much more); but there's the patron, sir, and though
A mallow or a friendly wink would soothe
In better ways anachronistic bones
As these of mine, the world must check and mate
Me if I ever hint at such a move.
A grave iconoclasm now prevails
Which, somehow, each of us must shatter out:
But there are years and trees and many births--
Yet not a billionth of a spark of time--
For us.  So where is our commencement won
If not beyond these wrinkled vines, if not
Beyond these growing stones, if not beyond?
Someone will speak of orbs to us, but we
Do not want orbs but herbs; but we do not
Want herbs but love: learning all our lives.


                                                (1965-1982)



-
Brian A. J. Salchert