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.

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