monday muddlings: crossing against the light

It’s another fiction Monday, focusing on poetry. I have been 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, so I’m now taking some time to draft a few new pieces to accompany my presentation. Here is another poem in progress, like last week, an oldie but a goodie.

Crossing Against the Light

I wanted to make something beautiful, so that I could then destroy it.
I wanted it to be my hands, not yours, that deconstructed this thing
–this thing that was meant to last–
and it be my eyes that watched as you stomached the beautiful cruelty
in the way that the tower fell so quickly and yet so softly, as if the dream
was more real than the substance and the everything but falling ash.
It was to be retribution, to repay wickedness in kind. But there was not
within me that darkness you were so keen on possessing. My hand bid not move.
There was no warning in your departure, there was no sign that we were
living out some poorly crafted lie that neither of us understood and yet
both of us were responsible for. We were but players in a game that
was constructed for the sake of dark and desolate amusement.
And now I find myself fingering the pages of journal entries and
clicking through photos where false friends gave false smiles
and false laughter masked true despair. And I still have no answer.
Not that there was ever a question, for questions would have been luxury.
There was the cold stare, the cold glance, the cold sighs. There was the
presumption that I would play along, there was the expectation that I
would simply agree. Agree with a darkness to entrapping to stomach.
It was the end, it had been for awhile, and we both knew it.
Midway upon the journey of our lives, we found ourselves in
different places. You in a dark wood and I somewhere in the mists beyond.
We were not kindred, we were not brothers, we were strangers living in
the disjointed silence of a world that was too small for either of us
and tried to compensate for our enormity that it attempted to swallow us whole.
There was a time, so long ago, when the sun was for the two of us.
I have left you now in the fields grown dark, to pursue the endless sun.
I turn back every now and then, to look upon that field and watch happy
ghosts act out long forgotten memories of goodness and joy, and I turn
my head away to look before me, to that place beyond that is not a
castle made of ash, that is not a life built on shifting sand, but a place
that is a cloister, a grove in a sacred field, where a Lady waits unveiled
and a table is rounded by knights. An Abbess administers the Eucharist
and the whole is surrounded by trees. It is there I turn my gaze and find,
at last, an enduring dream of peace.

© 2011, Preston. All rights reserved.