With credit to my Irish neighbor (who admits that in school he hated Shakespeare), and apologies to all the poets everywhere, here is sonnet 64:
When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defac’d
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-ras’d
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the wat’ry main,
Increasing store with loss and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate,
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death, which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
Inevitably three a.m., phone ringing far too early on a far too rainy morning, day’s dread echoing with what’s behind and what’s ahead, our own heads pierced with brighted edges of too light too little sleep.
We could not see the clock hands closing in, ranging silent around the warm and comfortable herd, the seconds draining away the days like sand drains years and suddenly they’re gone, all gone. And so are we.
The potentates and billionaires ride ‘em cowboy cosplay. Enslaving us to sell us things, ship us things, make media our gods.
Oh, we are afoolish, morn or eventide, so foolish; how we would that we were dead.
Ice cream emperor of our dream, our ragged claws, the days do not remember us.
We have been carefully cooking those last bowls of pasta, drawing the last parallels, sighing under the last constraints, our ships at anchor only a little longer as stars fainten with a brightening east. The wind picks up at dawn.
Oh, we’ve seen it.
And we’ve heard it too, in different ways. Joni Mitchell singing both sides now, Leonard Cohen’s Famous Blue Raincoat (maybe Jennifer Warnes’ rendition even moreso), all the endless lonely mystery of life.
In the end, we are all standing alone in the rain, standing at a pay phone booth (even though the digital age has murdered all of these), or standing with a mobile phone, battery too low, uncertain of how much time we have or even whom to call.
For in the end, there’s really no one to call.
旅に病んで 夢は枯野を かけ廻る
tabi ni yande/ yume wa kareno wo/ kakemeguru
sick on my journey,
my dreams go wandering
on this withered field–Matsuo Basho, Death Haiku, 1694
That’s why it’s hard to sleep. It isn’t only the wind and the rain, lashing against the window pane, the window pain, seeing how big the night outside and too inside the room.
We watch the sun set over the vast fields of the republic. Ah, well. We knew damned well it wasn’t perfect, but somehow it seemed nice while it lasted. An almost Rilke-like sense of keep your own death to yourself and let me have mine. I do not begrudge you your own over tidy religious ways and rites, but at my end I will resent you foisting your ways on me.
Do not bury me in your capitalist field, clutching your tired communist manifesto, tattooing me with your ways of thinking of the world. Then I will spare you my barbarian chants and ways, my morning haze, the cooling kiss of evening fog sweeping down the valleys like a stream. Oh, I do not want from you. Not words, not faith, not the dissolving wraith of conversation of weather and professions, all that we do not have in common yet is commonplace. Can we not stand on ceremony?
We stand at the grave of democracy, creativity, free expression, and critical thinking, all killed by a rising tide of ignorance and hate. Critical stinking. Logos stabbed to death by ignorance and lying in a shallow grave at the feet of some confederate general’s statue.
The angels mourn but they stand aside to allow us our own free doom. Freedom? No. Free doom.
At least we can be left alone. There still is that.
Death can be big or little. Friendship, love, the road, the sky; the last capellini wondering why it’s left upon the plate, the fire dying in the grate. Dare we remember how the lemon looked or mango tasted? The pomegranate? Oh, I will not go on.
Is that what I meant at all? Not at all?
Prufrock has heard the mermaids singing each to each. He tells us so.
He does not think that they will sing to him.
Spoiler alert: I doubt it too.
In the end, there’s only us, walking down that predawn road, wondering if day will bother to show up at all.
Life itself is neighbors loading pickup trucks with cabinets at 5:30 a.m. on a Sunday. The rain has stopped, owls fallen silent. The long and winding road leads on ahead to the wine dark sea. We follow down our memory. Country lanes and summer afternoons.
One crow for sorrow.
You cannot sleep enough to keep you sane these late days churning, overturning, red sky beckoning coyote in the field.
We see crow, coyote, hare and we think tricks. But tricks are for kids. Absence down all the days and nights? What we get for growing up.
Seems, Madam? Nay, it is. I know not seems.
Yet all is seeming now.
We seem to live, cellophane flowers all yellow and green, towering over our heads. Look for the girl with the sun in her eyes and she’s gone.
The doctor is out, not that Lucy Van Pelt ever really helped. Cheese only a minor bandaid for the troubled soul yet it is also all we have. Linus’ philosophy leaves us empty. Cold.
Oh, do not ask “what do I mean?”, let us go and see the unseen scattered remains of a broken day.
Everything remains unclean, even though we’ve gleaned these fields before today, repetitive bore of way on way, on into the evening clay, and where we long to be.