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
