Slipping Through Time (...perhaps arrives a ship)

...A Poem

 

 

I dug my heels, sank my teeth in time; once richly lived,

each moment carved, primed with transcendence, beauty, grace;

all things savored, transfixed, imbued, then relinquished

to life's next embrace. Now, with disconcerting pace,

I slip untouched -- but for outrage, sadness, sense of loss --

through mindless mediocrity, lubricated

by technology, quarantined by decadence

of modern horror-man, artifice, corruption-maimed.

No ground, no center, no foundation can be laid,

as if all things of life were daub and wattle made

of ignorance and loss of sensibility.

No solid substance can be found, no purchase gained;

no traction, no significance that might engage,

define our swift slide from zero into nothingness.

 

Falling through space and time, from slippery woman's womb

and oily world of man, nothing touches, catches, holds.

What can void damnation, the fearful daily work

of horror-man, grip gone on grit of living earth?

Beauty, ethics, value, joy? None stick to minds

as slick as glass and steel. Why, then, seek a fallen star

that's lost its light, exalting flame become but ash,

life lived bereft of consequence in empty noise

of banal, passing day? Why eat that which proves fatal

in its flavor? If we must search for life and health

amid this deathbed world, still cling to shards of meaning

-- in ourselves, if not society -- like flotsam

in the catastrophic sea ... perhaps arrives a ship,

yet masked by bulge of earth, below horizon's reach.

 

Copyright by Don Gray