Two Poems for this Poetry Day
March 21 is International Poetry Day, and Hand to Mouth Publishing celebrate by sharing two poems by Jan Valentin Saether (from his upcoming poetry collection, working title "The Abraxas Verses", Hand to Mouth Publishing, 2017). Enjoy!
***
The Gorgeous Gap
The new wisdom snake
does not close
the gap
like the older image
where the tail is in jaws
This newness now reveals
what proud predicament concealed
The last little gap of missing context
will not be bridged
At the entrance or the exit
or here .............
right now
something hides from view
in the full cycle of creation
Be it the universe
a single living cell
or an individual consciousness
all have boundaries
to mysteries
of open ended celebration
No settlement on law and order
stands the onslaught of the new
A tidy tucked cosmology
postponing urgent questions
has a prize
to be exacted
for the satisfaction
of a closure
What unpredictable event
may come from just within
the crustaceous shell of shame
Thoreau’s remark:
“Most people
Live their lives
In quiet desperation”
There
darkness of their private mire
births the private urge
to have the world arranged
within precocious order
opting thus to pass on
the copious conundrum
of why this closure
is so fundamentally
desired
Stories told
with victory and completion
conspire to hide and control
this dizziness
of remaining in the open-ended question
Hedging on the edge
avoids that troubling dance
of moving lightly
tangent to perilous
time
The gorgeous gap
is like the tomb of Tut
hastily arrayed against death
with precious well wrought technology
and built on fickle theories
Thoughtless fantasies
of staggering proportions
and at a cost
that is immense
What fear fills in
blocks the missing context
and veils
the valid vistas
where generous gifts of life
emerge
from the gorgeous gap
***
Welcoming a Lost Friend
A few months now
since your body was sunk beneath the snow
The bed of dirt by the stone has new spring grass
By the gardener shed in the shadow of the hill
there are still crusts of ice under the birches
I converse with the tombstone
cry for the first time
You dead and me alive..... I said
How can that cold and singular fact be the truth
I feel dead compared with the strange strength
of your surrendered presence
Where you were flesh and friend before
the emptiness now
is even more filled with your body
your somatic carnal fragrance
That morning towards the victory time of cancer
your quiet thin voice on the telephone
barely moved the membrane
Said that I greeted you
at your night journeys' spirit destinations
that I was avake with you
when you were sleepless inside your dying frame
I said ... I sleep at night
at dawn I leep from my bed of oblivion
stung in my shame
by the image of you in hospital white
You said ..... it’s not about that
I was nailed by those words
arrested from slipping away in my surge of sorrow
had momentarily forgotten
what a thousand years of friendship had accomplished
And here now....
It’s raining ligth droplets on the grave
dark polkadots emerging on the dusty umber
Your living spirit awakening inside my deadness
The same thin voice
now ringing in my ruins:
Come.
I am avake in you
as an abiding chance
for deeper honesty and greater realms of integrity
And in this gift .......
a visit with your quickening laughter
