Evidence in Fenton
EVIDENCE IN FENTON
The Silver Queen and King have gone -
Sailed in their burning boat
Where all good kings and queens go -
While huge cats still smile for children,
and parents regret their mistakes.
As if in spite, the town hasn’t changed:
sidewalks split by upstart roots
don’t heed history’s call or kneel to memory.
I find danger walking here: traps and snares
laid long ago now widen, gape, grow hungry and sly -
my intent staring into each shivers nails from rafters,
collapses edifices, topples temples, releases Krakens
safer left slumbering in undersea tombs.
The pond has aged to a long, dry hole,
where the swans’ nests once gave birth
to dreams and grace and deliberate motion -
host now to footprints and feathers– charmless wisps
no one recalls with anything like longing.
Dueling churches on opposite corners repose stolidly,
Upholders of illusion and self-denial,
their angular rings fading yet grimly asserting dominion
over towns and butterflies and gray dreams.
In the pre-dawn before the Sun’s torch
welds closed the eye’s briefest glimpse of day...
I would cast all this away, extinguish the flame...
But, still... the torn flesh... the fractured bones of it -
the blood and scars and nauseating pain -
I’d have to find some calm and heal all over again.
No... chained to this rock, consuming myself,
the taste of it familiar and foreign and intoxicating...
is far better than the curse of accepting and moving on.
Without the reminder of what never was
hope has no foothold, no anchor to hold it
nor plinth to raise a monument defiling
the laws that chain us to this dimension.
Now’s moment is tomorrow’s past, today is yesterday’s future -
riffle the pages fast enough... see eons in an instant.
In dreams I see them whooshing by,
a maelstrom of golden leaves, their substance transformed
by the wind of the centuries passing,
while the true incandescence of this galactic conflict
forges blossoms infinite in their possibilities.
For Frank and Cassandra– 2023
The death of two people I cherished - my world diminished - but they were forgotten in theirs...
