That Next Season

©  2015  Steve King

All rights reserved

i. 

It had become that next season so soon,

each of us still holding tough

upon the old designs.

As if to know unmeasured newness

must be just another sham;

as if a newness would not last,

could not last to shake the silence,

loose the tired spell.

ii

The dreams of age do still cascade

mightily to white mornings

and every captive emptiness.

As if new mornings might bring dews

to salve those night fevers;

new light to master every form,

and fill each waiting sense.

The dreams of pleasures spent,

the keen of old laments

calling from the latter shores

of what shall serve as memory.

Rising maelstroms and new mystery

to trim the shape of every grace

roiling there in dark currents,

gathering daily on that edge of dawn:

all, past and future, held to certain time,

new instants, knowing and unknown

unfounded, then found—

fair inklings of what might have done,

and of what yet may be,

scattered like unburied bones

to stitch a tale upon

a desert dreaming-ground.

iii

Waiting advent of new sounds,

the hint of some deserved happiness

so close—we lingered, patient,

paused, to catch a rising chorus note:

hymns of any bright purpose at all,

or any power that would sing

amid the ruptures and the new-made rupturing.

Seeming so at ease,

watching in the sun like morning flowers,

(silly in the absence of all meaning)

waiting, caught up in reflexive motion

(happy then, in absence of all meaning).

No time for a straggling vision of belief,

nor weight of addled discontents.

We, in every nuance of new light

without admitted prejudice,

or hopes, or dark device,

not seeming to believe in any thing

save a morning, save a sun.

iv

And yet the shadow of an old delight

did ply its way through memory

and the rampart ways of our desires;

as if delight could be reborn

alone from the stilled air,

from echoes long gone by.

As if old feeling might at any time reprise

without a cause or recompense,

or toll of unforeseen regret.

v

I tried to know all answers,

even without leave to ask,

in hopes that would not change,

in ideas long formed,

like stars we saw arrayed

in some faint corner of a sky;

each night,

            then next,

and next,

until, always, the sun…

our eyes alight like stars,

and then, always, the sun…

vi

And each awakened conversation

devolved soon to long smiles,

awaiting words, laughter,

without even breath.

All the gazing lost upon the distant view,

redoubt of a promised charm,

hoping, ever, for an end

to match the pleasant recollections

we had always used.

vii

In a shuttered room

I saw again the old portrait,

left to muster what it might of time,

searching eyes beneath a sheath of dust;

so like a faded mirror gone to mottle,

left at last to render what it must;

gathering a faint reflection,

casting only what it could of us.

viii

And saw myself at last as I must be,

revisiting the times,

again, again, the times,

unrelinquished to their days;

and dreaming with a will

to witness and recover,

reciting still the old plainsong

and catechisms chanting each lost chance.

Every mood drawn back to tend upon

service of all absent shades

teeming in the doorless depth;

silence there, impenetrate,

traced not with the sunlight or my stars,

nor the glow of radiant dreaming;

without presence left to warm;

each mouth a hollow shadow

echoing phrases long unmourned,

and all their damned ancient oaths.

ix 

We are used to listening,

in tangles of regard,

in the fashions of rapt repartee,

in every way that politesse

redeems our crude awakenings

to others sudden in the small circle—

watching worlds collide

without accustomed warning,

nor a feast of omens

for gangs of hungry seers.

I am used to waiting for the word,

treasuring in that old excessive fashion

all the things that I have yet to learn.

Calibrating each response, just so,

not to upset assumptions or fears

held for obsolescent reasons,

and even, at the last,

the sometime certainty of simple humdrum.

x

And in the beginning…

Summers old, the child would linger

in abandoned orchards,

following the wagon ruts along

a fading road to sunset,

always content in the thinning shade

of waning elm and chestnut glades,

reeling at the shadow of a circling hawk,

pausing only for the mother’s sunset song

that summoned every darkness,

when dreams would gather and embraid

the treasures of a wondrous day—

just a day, as all else then, his own,

the currency of infant expectation,

for every kind of nascent hope,

when always dreams would measure true

and sure, and new,

and seeming without end.

A new poem for The Poetry Pantry
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Morning

©  Steve King

All rights reserved

The clockface called it morning,

but without sense of newness,

nor of a moment pregnant

with light upon the world:

time enough to count the hours backward.

My sigh rolled across

a clutch of gathered blankets,

ill wind coursing on a naked peak.

My shadow fell across the emptiness—

stormclouds close upon a fallow field.

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These Mornings

© Steve King

All Rights reserved

These mornings the old men,

staring through the fog of coffee steam,

sing of spirits visiting their dreams,

and of a distant year,

of tears that will not balm

things that were simply meant to be.

And ritual tales of fair desire

to claim the place of memory;

laughter to deny that certain moment;

myriad reasons safely hid,

meanings that are cloaked amid

the fog of these mornings.



A new poem for The Poetry Pantry
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Bones

by Steve King

© 2015

and then, you see,
when they came to break your bones

you learned to tell them things

some of it was true I know

but other parts could make no sense at all

I wondered if they knew the difference

wondered at the sounds I made

a chorus of dark music

echoing a distant tongue

much felt like a dream

the darkness

and the sudden light

the inversions

the cold

the darkness

and the hearthless heat

day and night at once

no element of sky or earth

or grace of wakening beyond

the mind left strangely free in flights

to ease hardening bonds

darkness

just as if a dream

where only strangers meet

do no harm I thought

but could not think

I did not think

save for one small thing

there comes that moment when one hopes

that he has finally known it all

will never stir to see another face

and yet 
he chooses still to name it hope

 

The Way

© 2015  Steve King

All rights reserved

Everything I read,

the musics that I hear,

grave statuaries gesturing to me

depictions, portraiture,

the call of this or that philosophy—

each of these, you say,

reflect a distillation

of some perfected world.

But only through another’s heart, I say.

These will not levitate me on their own

to some, or other, supposed place or time,

undoing what the world has done to me,

forestalling what it yet may do,

or often breach the shadows

that flow across each moment

of even the most casual of the minds.

Such beauties as here be

are like the concrete guards,

or steel fence poles,

or rounding moats,

or bright signposts

or winding stairs,

or dreaming notes

that channel this journey

through what I hope

shall one day be a life—

guides only to my wandering

toward that far pathway

dimly held in my present guesswork,

yet one that has been ever laid for me.

Though never on my journeys

in that quest for latent grandeurs,

hidden still in that stubborn array,

shall I expect some sudden perfect vista to appear.

Those worlds barely foreshadowed

by all these things

I read and see and hear:

those things that pose between our meanings—

dark for me, for you so blinding clear.

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The Assignation

©  2015 Steve King

All rights reserved

You rest so easy in the guise

of your delighting dream,

with sunlight full upon your breast,

and shadows fallen on your eyes.

And from that dream confuse my name—

forget, it seems, the afternoon,

the waiting wonder that inflamed

in every sudden thrall.

So quick the fire, no need the moon;

and yet so soon your dreams required

that other call.

I’ll never ask you to deny

endearments that might seem misused,

for sometimes dreams must be excused.

But oh,

where have they fled, My All—

those thousand sighs?

Notes From Near The Cedar River

©  Steve King 2015

All Rights Reserved

I cannot see the way from here, out of

this darkness, and the weight of every dream—

strange transients, each one too brief to mark

its meaning on the face of any mood.

The night brings unmapped worlds into my view,

a dark vision that shares no grand display

beyond a bare perception, though I look

to every star, on each grim shape alive

in phantom silhouette, to reflections

that dance on surfaces, yet flare as deep

as any sky-bred fire in distant keep,

all borning to this unquiet intent.

The flow I hear, and I can sense movement

upon this world; a leaving, and the gift

of bringing far to near; a sense of old

and of the yet unknown, but never one

to mark an easy instant here for me,

to substitute for what must suit as now,

that holds no comfort, either of my place,

or where any horizon may yet call.

All cause remains a mystery to this:

each testing thought only hypothesis,

no startling conclusions to the fore,

no matter what another may conceive

about these musings, or the nascent brief

of any notion set to flourish here.

If wishes led, then might I find a path,

for I have spent a soul on each desire

that raised me to make bold in sentiment,

in faiths and perspective, in loves and song;

and more, when art has failed to every end,

and I aspired to music of next best.

Yet I cannot imagine better things,

or different half measures to embrace,

than to behold myself in every way

unfinished, and awaiting fuller days,

each draught of expectation just enough,

compelling me to silence at the last;

but decent silence, not forlorn escape,

nor uneasy retreat from some unknown:

these scattered stars remain and they may leave

no disarray.  It is for me to trace

the measure of those ageless ones complete

in every shaded meaning cast below,

in latent music teasing all around,

which holds no cadence for impatient hearts.

For there is art to spare in this waiting:

imagining the shapes of destiny,

and forms to fill out every half-cast dream.

Each hollowed moment gathers to the point:

how hopes must find their birth in emptiness—

a dark invention of the soul’s escape

from all that weighs; how hoarded memories

wake to remind of each thing fallen short;

how each unspoken, unremitted sin,

in its reluctant rising to fresh light,

may gain a grace to turn its burdens right,

or even find brief peace within the folds

of some abiding ambiguity.

A modest triumph, to outwait a night

and gather modest truth; for I am where

all meanings must devolve if any be;

if meaning may be recognized at all

beyond the murmur of the shifting airs,

the roll of waters, and the moon’s new light.

Such modest triumph, teasing beauty so

from each intruding thought, each pausing word,

in sudden longings that would steer my heart

if only I might let an old one go.

And so I hold for newness and surprise,

and cede a patience that is rare in me.

The old night, calling faintly to its own,

with a new irony smothers old dreams;

I am a page awaiting its new marks

that render paths to where old souls repair.

Withholding judgements now, and past all care,

I shall remain, ‘til beauty shows me there.


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