Borrowings

©  Steve King 2012

All rights reserved

How do you write this stuff?

Just words—

Not so!

 

Yes!                

Not so very different,

            than you yourself would use

            alone...or to yourself.

I don't do that so much...

            Oh yes.  Perhaps you just don't listen closely...

Suppose I did?   
How would it sound aloud

or to  some other?

You make words seem…different—

there's something lurking between syllables,

a kind of common code,

the way the words display.

Anyone can understand the heady spirit there.

I'm barely articulate—

words can't make their way across my lips

without a mangling.

Sometimes I wonder

if I know myself well enough to try...

So, how do you write these things?

            Ha!  I toss words in the air—

            each one falling back of its own mass

            into a proper place.

            Then I play a game with them,

            find a pleasing pattern;

            they have to suit the eye as well, you know;

            massage more than the one sense,

            assault them 'til they crumble

            powerless before the inevitable.

            But first, of course, there must be an idea...

That's no answer.

The question stays,

attaches to each glib evasion here.

I still can't understand the way it fits...

none of it explains

the way the words lie perfect on a page,

envelope me with pleasure...

and then sometimes the feeling that I get,

as if you've read my mind,

or fathomed something larger—

tapped into the full being of me,

my forgotten parts,

moments echoing from dark corners

I had never seen fit to explore,

and still don't know to comprehend…

If you're unknowing, how may I explain?

You've heard...something,

felt something;

taken something from a phrase:

the essence of some accidental truth

that I have stumbled on

in my candid peregrinations;

a truth that you've kept hidden,

precious for some reason of your own;

a dark facet, yes,

unused perhaps, abandoned or ignored,

but nonetheless a truth

because you know it.

But if you're asking me

how I might know it's true for you,

well, there is yet another mystery...

But you make me ashamed,

my feelings assailed,

left naked in full light.

How do you find these tokens?

How can you lash these nerve ends undeterred

by any sense of modesty?

Is there no shadow immune from this?

No sadness?

No secret?

You give me too much credit.

             I wish I could claim it,

             but the burden is all yours,

             and yours the prize.

             I can ill afford the drain of so much feeling.

             I'm only trying to get something right,

             less imperfect and more beautiful.

             It's work at its worst.

             If I had to pause at every couplet

             to take stock of deepest feelings...

             I don't know how the work would ever end.

             So complex, those things, and incomplete:

             a feeling never finishes, you see,

             it leads right to the next,

             hands off its emotion

             to be used again

 to fuel some other dormant mood.

             I must never lose myself in that,

             must note only the mood

             and not what underlies it all,

             not while there is paper left to fill,

             and some unknown waiting to read it.

             I'm a performer, see; a pro;

             deadlines and all that,

             even if self-imposed.

             No time to plumb the paradoxes

             of mundane despair

             and enervating ecstasies.

             No, let them settle elsewhere

             if they must.

I'm not sure I like you

quite so well as a moment before.

Just a trickster?

Is it all marketing and manipulation?

How do you choose your victims?

Why am I bothering to ask you?

Please, not quite like that...

            Does it seem so bad?

            I guess I was better off

            before I tried to shed the mystery.

            I would never play loose with your feelings.

            I just...borrow them for the moment,

draw them down from the common pool,

            mold them--just a bit--to fit my hand.

            After all, you can't begrudge a tradesman

            burnishing a product with his brand.

            When I've come to the end of figuring

—as best I can—

            I give those feelings back to you

            with just a little dressing up.

            Any value added is my gift,

my thanks for the motive,

            for the quick use of your soul,

            which, itself, has helped me see

            to where I've never been before.

            At least, that's the plan.

            Nothing insidious there, I hope.

            I need levers outside myself

            to orchestrate this world

            in a way that will make sense.

            So you have helped with that.

            In return you have a glimpse

            of what it is I've seen.

            Not the truest world perhaps,

            but one that must suffice until the next idea...

            Yes, you see...the idea…

            If you’ve been tricked to the misuse of your feelings,

            I have at least shown something back:

            that idea that must lie at the core,

            framed in a sharper focus

            than you discerned before.

            My vision is the prism.

            Your soul provides the ready light.

The way you talk,

it’s one allusion then the next,

points hidden in obscuring metaphors;

a graveyard for common words and meanings.

            Well…you’ve surprised me.

            You’ve forced me to improvise,

            no time or method to make clear

            how I may truly mean a certain thing.

            I’ve told you, poetry is work,

            the worst I could devise.

            I try to gather minute meanings

            magnify them to infinite form,

            give you all a chance to share my mirror—

There you go again!

            Amen.

            I’m guilty.

            How may I amend?

I have still the question:

How do you write these things?

            You must find your answer in my silence.

            I can’t exchange this alchemy for science

            the way your wish intends.

            You must grant me magic, at the last,

            where, I fear, both question and answer

            do surely come to a dead end.

            For I still marvel when you see

either charms or mystery

            in any thing that I compose.

            It’s there the magic lives for me…

            For now, let conversation close.

Afterthoughts

©  2012 Steve King

All rights reserved

When you labored your last breath,

I had long been elsewhere.

Bad news, they say, travels fast,

though it seems, not far:

I, who once knew much of you,

was then unknowing.

What are lifetimes, looking back?

Yours read well enough to me

even without note of us,

or other quondam artifacts.

No indeed--our trove lay deep,

hidden in the secret bottom

of some misplaced trunk,

while others that I never knew

gathered then to carry you.

Better to have never heard:

another year—who knows?—

might well do all for me;

or better yet a courier

less inclined to squander news.

Nothing now points much to old scenes—

though I still choose my moments

to puzzle over absence,

and the haze of ancient afternoons,

or sometimes on fabled afterlives

and happy tales of immortality,

which have always seemed to be

no more than an apology

for absences writ large,

unbreachable.

Yet will I hold these things aside.

and let the skeptic's surety be tried

upon the very thought—

that there may be

a shadow of forever clinging near,

so long as this remembrance visits me.

To The Fair

©  Steve King

All rights reserved

We walked the road through twilight,

nightingales teasing from small shadows;

the emptiness ready for all bold spirits.

There were faint stars enough

to draw thoughts of a deeper night,

and of summer pleasures to be gathered at the fair.

As we rounded the last curve we passed the tree—

the grave and heavy circumference;

slowed our march,

so quiet.

The tree was a killer.

We saw, the week before,

the carcass of the ‘65 Corvette

as it was towed to town:

covered with a shroud of canvas,

hidden in the furthest corner of the salvage yard.

But we would see beneath it, and we did;

marveling with high amazement

at dark stains spilled across bucket seats

as if by some new miracle

of upholsterer’s art.

Marvel we did, but once,

joked just once,

timid laughs falling to a kind of sigh.

In our retelling to the less bold,

we spoke brazenly of gore,

as if we had become attuned

to that kind of death,

or to any kind;

spoke the way we thought

the others would best hear,

the way we thought a soldier

might have spoken of his battle ground;

or the way a cop might talk of routine carnage;

spoke of bits and pieces that were scattered in the car,

pieces not all metal or at all mechanical;

intoned at length on what the scattered pieces might have been.

The tree at dusk on a country road.

The tree had only done what a tree must do:

stood its ground,

age and dignity unshaken

by the race of passion or hubris

or even careless indifference.

And the car had only done what a car must do—

yielding to great stressors that were never meant to be.

The unknown couple, too, complied with due necessity:

shattering—not neatly, it was said,

unjoined, but not at logical places.

We counted out our steps,

knowing the roads intimately,

knowing steps and distances

from one place to the next.

Headlights marked us.

We might lose our number,

but there would always be,

away in the near distance,

hovering above the forest line,

the glow of the fair,

faint music growing stronger step by step;

and finally the great wheel,

alive with rainbow lights,

coursing a path skyward,

to yield it’s shining vessels to the night.

Talk soon overtook the nightingales,

and rapt imaginings

made bright the evening sky.

We moved in a strange kind of present

that held a dawning future in abeyance:

knowing we were doing all that we were meant to do

that summer, that night,

along that chosen road,

the summer sky a canopy

for all small charms so soon to be embraced…

I looked back.

Our road had left that tree behind,

just beyond the reach of the long curve,

lost in the tide of encroaching shadows.

The music louder now—

that eternal present soon set to pass

into the lightness

of a temporary balming dream

of many brief inviting moments

all at once just waiting…

Away from the shadows,

and the grasp of hard necessity;

away from subtle curves

that skew even much-traveled roads.

Then quick steps and laughter,

the pull of vesper gratitudes,

for what an evening might beget…

I prayed that I would one day

better care for a Corvette.