Tuesday, August 14, 2012

An Angler Silently Waits

digital art: ralph murre


An Angler Silently Waits
by Gary C. Busha

I

Rain falls
and glass allows sunlight
first freely through then
later in yellow tinges
somewhat distorted in forms
though no great matter to me
since silence brings the same
lack of breath
in a kind of suffocation
as impatient drivers rev
their engines at intersections
engines similar to nightmares
when in the early morning I try
to recall a dream so vivid but
lost at the instant of awakening.

II

Nor would the forgetting disturb me
if the failure were not a reminder
of dogma cited in textbooks
by professors intent in their learning
but unaware of deception’s slippery eel
as is the rockbass hugging a weedy shore
or the minstrel singing for free
to the young whose wisdom is a tune I too
would sing if the song were poetry and
free from past moment’s regrets
caught in night’s flashy broil and pressed
against damp window panes.

III

But yet nothing is worse when light fails
not in meaning perhaps or inspiration
or the hollow knowledge the light
was never meant this gilded affectation
or to a lesser extent this phony
entertainment performed for laughs
by jesters nor should the touch
of cold rain upon naked shoulders
cause alarm if the word has no primal source
has not sprung from heaven or hell or
from the still point of nothing.

IV

But since light grows larger in circles
despite the chew of time
each word falls from its portrait like flakes
of paint and peels in thin serpentine lines
repeated even upon blackened cave walls
lit by torches until the flickered
rhythm matches the ripped heart whose ruin
is no less ignored than before this moment’s
spin on the ferris-wheel for failure is subordinate
to water’s steady fall upon crystal window panes
in rivulets while I lament the rain's patient silence
as wet line builds on a spool.


~ first published in The Third Eye, No.8