Poem: Watery substance

*

He grew old without noticing --
was mental absence
a part of ageing?
Or did his caution make the difference?

Think. Think. Cast memory
back upon the sweet ones
gone suddenly or quietly but early,
because there is true absence.

The veteran's hands shake
too much to work --
he wheels his chair or leans back
on the worst bench in the park.

His buddies are dead.
Would that have been better?
He once saw a teenager explode
on a battlefield, a teenager,

and he thought
to himself wait
his life isn't done yet:
this kid's not even complete.

But complete? Where
was that now? Then the veteran
stopped thinking -- needed liquor
to wet his brain.

The poem's narrator
never went
to war nor
could he know what going meant.

He was naîve about a cost
not his to pay
at least
not overtly.

Time could be a purge of all one's
crudities and false hopes
but in the end experience
only emptied people out -- perhaps.

All roads led down into
wisdom he was sure -- life travelled down
into itself, but also into knowledge of itself as its term grew
long enough to curve back into recognition.

One's own slow death was worth having
because only from having first lost
this sense of being young
could the full sense of youth have been noticed.

"In school our teachers told us
to shape our future consciously
make the future conscious
or else it would turn to shape us its own way...

With us or without
us it would still occur
and our choice was to climb on top of it
or be dragged under.

I heard but didn't heed
their warning, not exactly, because
I couldn't decide
first of all who I in any fixed sense was

and then, much less, secondly who I wanted to
be -- no. No. I never never
knew who, but only how,
I knew only how to go after

the thing by continual questioning,
and I knew that I never wanted
to take such an awesome thing
as existence for granted."

It was of a mucousy consistency
the ground that kept humans
from plunging recklessly
into transcendence.

There was an athlete who had dipped one little bud
into Coke-white bone-
like dust and fell inside for good
and never played ball again

and shot himself -- by the sea.
One can still feel the water
sleepily
rocking his soft cadaver.

The salt water sinks and pulls itself back out
like the tears a survivor's lips will suck
up and sideways into the throat
where they will thicken and get stuck.

The parents who grieved are dead now too,
they themselves like children, faces
filled with transient woe
only in that everything now was,

transient I mean --
like the face a child would make
when its ice cream cone
fell onto the dirty brick.

"I have been one to survive
without deserving to,
I haven't earned life, I simply live.
Others did more. But that one thing, no.

Unmerited, precious,
it must be probed,
saved, understood, if only because
I must know, were they honored or robbed?

I was never Orfeo
not to look at the one I rescued,
no. Impossible not to
see then caress that sweet head,

wondering at life not death,
since life barely remains
to me as well, and we both
skirt nonexistence and both retain existence,

mysterious substance, of which
there cannot be
too much
too long too far or -- my love -- too many."

*