As Far As You Know by A.F. Moritz

Author:A.F. Moritz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: House of Anansi Press Inc
Published: 2020-03-04T16:41:07+00:00

Dream

dream of day

dream of night

to be released

from the old

man the first

man brooding

his crimes and losses never

to be forgiven

dream in the key

of mercy the key

of colour and light

dreaming

to be released

from carefulness

into the new

human

3 August 2015

Escape to the Sea

1. Escape to the Sea

The ancient heroes longed only to stay home.

Or to reach home

across the sea. Did they fail to see,

raised on the edge of the sea,

wielding the sword edge, burning towers, by the sea,

burying comrades on the sea beaches, the blood

in the rivers flowing down to the sea,

weeping, roasting meat around fires next to the sea?

The sea was their only home.

The sea is no home to a man.

Much wandering sours and estranges his heart,

the sea is the desert, the living sea,

dead to a man, it will kill him, with its fishes,

its many fabulous citizens, its cold,

its black twistings like his dreams,

the vast expanses, little different ever,

slowly shifting, the bitter storms, come and gone,

impossible to remember except as dread. The vast

expanses and wandering them in the coffin hull,

and soon not even his body is a home,

it drifts or he rows it threatened or lets the sails

drag it flying over the treacherous

vastness that he is.

If only I could live in a tiny house

of sod and stone, a brief distance inland,

and there my voice inside me could talk with her

and with the land, so that when I grew stiff

with dwelling and I walked and mounted the dunes,

the sea

would dawn as a great freedom, the clean billowing

of the bedsheet, of the sail.

2. The Road: Homage: Cormac McCarthy

The great gate of the shore,

the black gate, the gate where, beyond,

the sun was always burning

mildly in its frame, the sun

low to the earth, a dawn or dusk,

the gate where the one who stood looking

in its terrible arch, trembling to move beyond,

to cross through it, always saw inward

the promised city

from his wilderness, and always saw outward

from the jumbled city he longed to leave

the green world, the distant

sparkling stream there beyond . . .

the prophet closed the gate

and then annihilated it. The shore

in his words ceased to be

a fringe of freedom

where we could stand

before freshness. Before mere power

clothed in the simplest diaphanous shift,

the first element, veiling

what? what body?

The jumble of the city now

lay spilled on the shore,

its disease filled the immobile waves.

There on the sand we found

lay a man just recently become a corpse

who had struggled across the vacant lot.

His son is crying

in the immense vista

with no one. Eternity

has changed: no more

the marriage of the one who died

to the sea that lives within the sea

and before it, but the terror and pain, everlasting,

of the one left alone.

To have to live.

10 October 2015; May 2016

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