griddlecakes, redux

Sometimes she is the mirror, bright!
But oh what might lie behind her silvered laughter?
Only the dissolution of the mission,
only the one chance to run from the final
dismembering of who we were originally.
Smells like buttered toast here today.
I yearn for sausages bursting with fat,
surrounded by the pickled cabbage, a strange
bread the manger for this sacrifice. I see
clearly now the way I hid this entire time,
with smoke and bourbon and too much vodka,
too many years. Nothing remains of that
once possible cartographer;
he threw his compass away and watched
the woman's graceless destruction.
Which one you ask, the mirror bright?
No, that version of myself became
someone valuable in her own game
and so divined her place outside
of time and space. Lucky bitch. Or
worse now, living with a child but not
the one that was to be the gate, does
she know the memory of her plan
detailed in dream song the red haired
priestess below the tree and me
screaming as I bleed and burn,
the harvest king returned to her
in the night, where she can still
feel my face and know the minutes
passing? Or, rather, past? And is
that howling the blank recognition
of our banal and ordinary pain?


I think I wrote this in 2005 and put it on the blog somewhere along the way. Slowly turning into a version of Whitman, re-writing the pieces over and over, trying to carve the meaning out more clearly. Still struggling for grace, of course. Of late the darkness of that time is lessened for me, but the way I changed because of these things becomes clearer. So, I see now how I let myself attenuate, if you will, in those years of complacent expectation that this woman would eventually come to me. That simply was a version of everything else I did wrong. It's hard not to simply see my life and choices as being essentially those of a lazy person, afraid to confront his own failure and just accepting of it. Banal and ordinary pain. See you at the checkout line.

Thanks to Jane Morrel for the strange breads and sour pickles images from one of her hospital poems. I seem to miss Jane the most of the writers that I knew in Springfield. And, she has been gone the longest.