Endgame

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R._N._Taber

This poem was written in the spring of 1970. It is among a number of early poems from my student years that I included in Vol. 1 of my Love and Human Remains quartet. I recall feeling very tired when I wrote it just after finishing an essay. I may well have had someone in mind at the time. Yet, looking back, I can’t help wondering if that someone might have been but an older version of, yes, myself…?

Could it be, I wonder, 45+ years on, that I had something of a feeling for some kind of endgame,  free falling into the ages-old poetry of time and space…or whatever… even at the ripe old age of twenty-four? Even then, I had a sense of posthumous consciousness, remembering those I have loved and lost, but whose better influences on me continue to light my way through darker, more complex business of everyday life.

('Fireside' by Joseph Henry Sharp, 1859 -1953)

ENDGAME or BEYOND DREAMS

Watch shadows rise and fall,
seek between and all that’s behind,
relax contours of informed mind;
wander, trespass, feel your way
through mists of pink 'n' grey - behold, 
all fond reason left untold 

Caress young visions huge moons
have kissed, meander pathways
time never missed, only you, dear fool,
who thought you knew it all 

Now gloom, now glow, as dawn's
blade strikes a bowed crown,
as if, in due time, freeing mind-body-spirit 
to slip slowly d

                        o    

                           w

                              n

                          

Copyright R. N. Taber, 1970; rev. 2015

[Note: A very early poem; it first appears under the title In Free Fall in Love and Human Remains by R. N. Taber, Assembly Books, 2001.]