THE SUNDIAL
If you should think me lucky, for I’ve yet to depart the days of youth
if you should find me beautiful, with my eyes bright and my lips full and smooth
if you should find my mind refreshing as a good book and my peace soothing as the ocean
know that
my passage is concealed
the sun shines yet on your time,
scorching the dial moving its way to the other side until it is lost in the fire
The empty classroom shuddered still,
When they made their final exit onto the street,
Amidst the muttering noises
The archaic and meaningless voices
Fixed eyes anticipating the fall
Of their menacing and stubborn will;
They walked onto the street
Where bashful light hid some corner there and here,
And embraced the fear.
Through what would it sustain,
This thing they find empowering,
On contemptuous paths they’ll crawl
In countless heated seas they’ll boil
But luscious paths and passionate waters,
They claim,
On the way to love visceral and irreversible.
How could they be more certain?
Oh… Wrinkles and pain,
Love’s queer, vain toil,
Children?
Or what duties life detains?
This thing,
Clumsy shame veiled by unflappable strength,
Crucifies their lives, brands their disgraceful breasts!
Yet they never wonder,
Nor do they seem to care
When youth passes before the judgment of time
What would then remain?
A tired sigh, a forlorn hope perhaps,
That minutes could start sixty seconds earlier
Or days could reverse their order,
Contemplating all the while, praying for the power
To conquer what their status can't reconcile…
What remains,
When his hair, all silver gray,
Reflects her youthful beauty and her mournful gaze?
When he can no longer tell her of written wonders
And read her fledgling short stories,
When she turns aloof to his stories,
And her secret pleasures inflame his greatest worries,
What does she retain
When he teaches, not with words and verses,
But through the webs on his aged face
Shows her the hell where she’s headed
Days in a lifetime of pain and a life spent in days of loneliness
Then with what could she nurture his faith
In love, when none of it remains
And what would they have gained,
These bohemian unbelievers,
From their swagger across the schoolyard,
Cautious rendezvous in late night coffee shops
Secret glances, creative renderings, risks and chances
And intellectual lovemaking
What would all of this have meant
When he grows old
"With the bottom of his trousers rolled"
His pride defenseless and her passion cold
What would they have gained?
And what would then remain?
and in the end it shall consume me