Self Portraiture

by Steve King

© 2005

All rights reserved

I would need a volume to remind myself:

I have loosed all, despite the best intent,

except some given sense of this moment.

Life is too long for the span and spur

of quaint ideals and self-defining force,

faint memories of bold designs

that onetime served to fashion out a course.

I would need an echo to assist recall

even of my solemn

and least random of words:

so long speaking with myself,

I puzzle what it is

that all those others might have heard…

I would plumb the lyric in each dark nuance

and hear old promises remade.

Minor harmonics, left long unsung,

might singly play their parts, now undismayed.

I would need the dreaming of a thousand nights,

winding close upon the ancient core.

There are secret provinces

carved in the heart’s domain,

and passageways to well-forgotten realms

where longings war with unrequited claims;

where best and worst may languish intertwined;

where every stillborn orison,

forever is enjoined.

There would be new wonderings

amid the monuments

of long-forgiven loves

now lingering in their twilight of regret.

I would gild anew the shape

of that less reflective age,

and dredge beneath old shadows

for talismans to strew upon

this now impatient page.

How will I learn to see anew

and intimate of every thing,

of half forgot imaginings

that call in wild archaic tongues?

Or murmur in respecting tones

to render true the softening song

that unsought sudden sadness brings?

I might wake to those dreamings evermore,

and never apprehend a passion

that compelled before.

It is a distant odyssey

to circumambulate one’s past,

and tend to sundry leavings

that were never meant to last.

Still, one treads a landscape

that may never be renounced.

It is a scene alit by vagrant fires,

where brilliance and full darkness do conspire.

And so, the eye does quickly tire…

So… I will need your vision to abet.

Now you must be my ready surrogate

to render out the meanings I invent,

to ratify this sum of vague intent.

I shall speak at large to your desire,

and levy all my thoughts as you require.