This Now
Gazing over my time's, history's, life's shrugging shoulders,
Back, seven evanescent decades,
To that year of my auspicious earthly birth,
My eyes glaze over,
With the melancholy haze of long-ago's necessary fading,
And the vital stream running in my heart's arteries,
Flowing through the tributaries of my soul,
Slows to the trickling whispers of my shadowing mortality,
Until, finally, as I slip into a reverie of death,
All of me becomes an invisible drip-drip-dripping of tears
Disappearing into their own overtones' echoes.
Now it is, and only now, with tenderness,
As immemorial stillness gently descends,
That my spirit listens to the beats of its threnody
And recognizes, in its corporeal rhythm,
The celestial signatures and registers of the blessed One,
Speaking through the visionary wisdom of my aging heart.
And oh, what rapture this is,
As the days, the decades, come racing back into my arteries,
Flooding my sad gazes with a blazing elation
That surpasses the grace of my original nativity,
And I know, in this now, that death will never know me.
05/11/11
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