Sunday, February 27, 2005

'A Life' by Michael Blumenthal

So you grew older just like everyone else
and the questions loomed
with their easy, alternating answers of yes and no
and then their reconsiderations,
promising us a false simplicity
like a flock of sparrows at dusk,
and you were there,
in the fragrant osciallating light
of the good, the noble, the daemonic,
and the simply inexplicable
that might have passed, in lesser hands,
for a kind of confusion,
but you saw it for what it really was:
the clarity of conflicting clarities,
the sorting out that led to no perfect solutions,
and so you merely contented yourself
with the here-today-gone-tomorrow certainties
you hoped would lead to the right choices
(or choices you could later define as right):
the bright, loudly proclaimed insouciance
of the jay, or the scent of lemons,
though you knew in the end
that you would always return,
like a shoe in love with its foot,
to the same luminous starting point
of mixed feelings, the susurrus
of your one body mumbling and cussing
from its nest of desires, that old tune
of the profane and the sacred,
the noble and daemonic,
the unanswerable singing.

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