The abrupt dark. And the populated evening coos With voices. Should I take My life from images that break 5 Or close in self-fallen ecstasy? I am no ghost, full of a ghost's Wry imaginings. All those Who lost the faith of chosen words Are dead or dying as I speak. 10 Night but names its night with calls, Dividing darkness with a coal Less absolute than questioning. But what if from some unasked Terror-ridden memory I should hear 15 The cry out of silence That concentrates--- All present being into a past image Unable to be abandoned? Or what if blackness has a soul 20 That registers the marks Of a midnight hand's midnight stenciling? Or expands the accidental mark By nightmare addition into an Infinity of absences? 25 A single sail can diagram the wind. equally the breathless soul will spend Its untracked solitary hours In a gradual darkening--- The inevitable, slow 30 Winding down of evolution, One last twist of intimacy. Yet something unexpected haunts, Some axle of impertinence controls These quiet hesitations. We had thought 35 Dumb cruelty into an artistic bliss, Something abstract and mathematical to erase The slurred insistent figures Responsibility delivers. Words That once symbolized the dead 40 Gladly fading, an automatic raven Shrieks and shakes Dew from the late autumnal trees Heavily swayed. No mirror- Making stream or self-deceiving, 45 Self-defining moon rides out to shell A dry old mind in light, that must create New darkness out of nothing to resist The silk insistence of her ways.
From the collection "Divine Revolt"
Written by Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
More information available on gregglory.com.