Behind the Wheel

1

There is no going back: the lights change
At life, and there is one direction driven –
Whatever detour, visit, we might arrange
From that beginning, the route is something given –
No planning of ours required, any opposition
Irrelevant – and every driver thus made
A passenger in a vehicle never chosen:
In any stopping, never stayed –
The end, if uncertain, in no way delayed.

2

So much everybody knows, with nothing new
In the general continuing traffic of humanity:
The opportunity offered of a passing view
Of things with unconcern, interest, antipathy –
Others that one would choose to see
Forever were that ever in one’s power:
Every such experience, though, immediately
Becoming loss, as hour after hour
One lovely thing disappears, and another turns sour.

3

How to make the most – or hold what’s best –
Of being, when all that is, is transience?
I would have you back again and ditch the rest
In all its disorder, tedium, its nonsense,
Material complication, and so condense
All that was, is, yet to be, into one unmoving whole:
And living in this, would recommence
This passing, wasting life with no other goal
Than loving more, refusing every lesser role.

4

But you are gone, are dead – and can one keep
Another free of the compulsion of time
Any more than extract oneself? – sleep,
As it were, to the side of things in some sublime
Dreaming, a state of inexistence, or climb
Into aloof, idling godliness? No, every good is lent:
All being borrowed, as if moments of rhyme
With some transcendent logos, a word whose intent
Of beneficence has been lost – if this is what it meant.

5

All this, I know too, is as it has always been:
A constant wish that what is might be remade –
As if an act of human will could intervene
In the fact of being mortal, somehow evade
The given conditions of life, and trade
These for fantasy – privilege the conceit
Of willed imagination and have this masquerade
As the real, seeking an advance in the retreat
From acceptance, adding illusion to the complete.

6

But none of this, though, answers to the heart,
To a state that is or seems – or both of these –
Not subject to common laws, but apart
From materiality, that seeks to seize
On the intangible, as if there were a species
Of life and time, not of this world, yet available
Within it and, in some grasp, able to appease
The aching sense of severance, and settle
Into peace the disjunction of being individual.

7

Yet I have known this – a blessedness, a grace –
In loving and being loved, have known
The inward and surrounds of a place
That did not, would not move, but which has shown
In its loss, its absence, that to be alone
In life is to be wholly in the irresistible flow
Of things, as one more among them, thrown
With every material object, every being, to go
Some distance, period of existence, make tomorrow.

8

If love is a part of life, this then must be its end:
To fade, disappear, with every person, entity,
Brought into a moment of creation – be penned
A while in ourselves in fragile matter, to be
Treasured as a thing of precious physicality:
Or if it is not this, but a glimpse of some motionless
But ever moving energy – ever fixed, ever free –
Within and beyond ourselves – the still process
Of all being – then death cannot make it less.

9

Still, my love, your death is an open rupture,
A breach in all that is familiar, immediate, here –
The objects you held, your portraiture,
The notes in your hand, though cherished, cheer
Only to dismay – but I must see things clear:
That these are trifles, irrelevancies – bric-a-brac
Obscuring more than it reveals – which steer
The mind from the truth of this fissure: a track
Where love walks in stillness, not forward, not back.

Print