A Chronicle of Days

I. The Places Without Things that Hold Them in Place

And she said: remove the image for "Zen"...a pause,
"...and Image Conscious, A Story to Tell." What else I forgot,
left adrift in the dark waters of Lethe, with the dark hovering above
With the soft haze of comfort as Charon's hand
Chartered the passage to the other side
Which could not be seen through the dark.
Only the bony hands of that insidious but sometime welcomed guide.
The outline of cloak. The soft churn of water against
The hull, the line of the hull up to the fore.
Of course, sight gazes out to the sides one faces
And the way forward, both of which offer nothing to be seen
But comforting dark somehow discomforting. Sight never
Gazes backward. A cough from another behind offers itself
As the thing which assures we are coming or going
From one place to another.


The images referred to are paintings. There is more:
What do we hold onto? What knowledge is shared
And knowledge is inferred between small relations,
Brief interpolations of movement and words?


There is more.

II. Conversations with Me

There was more to say and I wonder is this a phenomenon
Much in the same way that an eclipse of the moon
Is seen and discussed later and noted in the newspapers
After the fashion of events which are of significance.
Filler perhaps, but not history in the way we like to build
History--events that are ultimate or penultimate.

An eclipse of the sun, an eclipse of the moon--phenomenon
Which occur with recurrence. Comets are the same
And perhaps a better way to describe the conversation
You had with me long after words escaped our lips.
The conversation filling all the things left unsaid
Or what wasn't perhaps best said in the way I
I wanted it to say to, so that all things are completed.

I forget to honor the knife. The conversation with me
Is the one left to bleed, so it seems. But it should have
Left the pieces behind and reclaimed in recurrence.
This is the conflict of time and our time together.