Sight-worn lidless eyes turning inward
Seek darkness in the past,
Lie me in a shaded recess of the mind
Where kind memories diffuse a softer glow.
I mold words for your ears.
My fingers trace the contours of your thoughts,
A touch ever so light the pattern arches back,
Murmuring worlds, tasting the feel.
A groomed engine then,
We become an instant and breathing must be willed.
It is colder now.
The wire leading your voice through the maze underground chills it hard metallic—
I shall wear a tie for the rest of my life.

In this my Tokyo train (another rush hour day)
The shuttling of matter in entrails to the tune
Of a perched employee orchestrating the boom.
Toranomon. Mutes roam the corridors head bowed,
Trying the step to ground level, and emerge in the rain.
A hundred little gray worlds bloom in a flurry of umbrellas,
Hop graceless o'er puddles and puncture in doorways.
Sowing raincoats, myriads rush to the masque
Donning smiles on the way.

My pen as a lance probes and pokes at the wall till,
Self-propelled and sudden-sucked,
Spinning and swirling through the envelope,
Dizzying free, a part becomes the whole.
I am world, my hair foliage.
A courser wind-swept, my blood is new sap wailing.
A crumpled page.

In this his unbuilt house,
My father shall cajole the jet lag out our bones
And with it cement stones that to the hill shall draw the family in pairs.
Amber-suffused limbs by the green apple fire,
Bristling up down its beams of warmth to keep,
We shall suffer the dark to signal the way home.
The glasses at our hands (chalices rapt in ice) bitter sweetness encompass.
A gentian-flavored drink sings another for the road,
Tomorrow being Monday.

Please leave me not,
Through want of prevenient grace,
To partake with dodoes, dinosaurs, aborigines too,
Of a stuporous fate.
Fore the last yards of a once endless race,
Run now with the faltering office gait of
I that stitched, pant, and feverish spit more froth in unseeing eyes,
Lord of Life, show me Thy Grace. (July 1987)

Copyright ©2002 Olivier Serrat
sight-worn