monday muddlings: “pompeii and pimms in the last days”

I’ve endeavored to start bringing some fiction to the blog on Mondays and have not quite kept up with it for the past few weeks. Today I bring you something a little less complex than prose. Recently I was invited to present poetry at the University of Mary-Hardin Baylor’s Writer’s Festival in February, based on a few snippets of work I have completed in the past. I’m now taking some time to draft a few new pieces to accompany my presentation. Here I submit to you, very humbly, something electronically inked out in the joyous betwixt between evening vigil and sleep. Refinements are forthcoming, to the poem and to my soul.

Note: If you’re not accustomed or fortunate enough to know what Pimms is, think of it as the taste of Britain in the summer. I was told it’s best served while watching the royals on parade.

pompeii and pimms in the last days

the sky has exploded, but we keep clasping hands
something triumphant is sounding in the east
but our ears are trained on the parade passing by
as the queen and her consort, the lady and her lord
make their way in haste from the cathedral to the court
and from the court to the magisterium and from the steps
of justice to the sea, which waits to cast out the dead,
where the ship is to ferry them into
eternity
strawberries died in our glasses and half-moon peaches
flirted with uncertain fate perched atop the rim
while the liquor and its comfort and the mask of its invitation
and the succor of its invocation, lying initiation
was for us a kind of melody of something very old and something
enchantingly, toxically new
the sky has exploded, but we keep clasping hands
the war siren has sounded again and again
but our ears are surrendered to the haunt of the music box
and the ballerina spinning backward teetering on the
brink of grace and foolishness so that neither seems
beautiful and neither seems a glory for it all has
without warning or whisper come to that finality
as if all that has been and shall be,
has been
and shall be
the sky has exploded, but we keep clasping hands
our mouths are half-open with a scream to
make these dead bones live and rise as ash
falls as a fateful snow between our parted lips and
slakes the thirst of the dead with the medicine of
uncertainty, the coda before the recapitulation
of time and space and the circle that is without end
of the dream that we rouse from again and again
as we used to dance together in the sunshine
memories we now replay on empty screens
in drive-in theaters where the movie wasn’t the point
at all but the touch of you and I and those thousand
others all longing for and needing that same ever-present
wanting
and we knew things of meaning and kept the secrets of the beautiful

but the sky has exploded
and what now of our damned hands?

© 2010, Preston. All rights reserved.