The Paddock Review

Totality & Temporality

Die Erste Elegie

 

Vast was our beginning, stardust strung

through the fabric of the cosmos into

the blue breadth of sky and ocean.

Eternity brought you to me, slung you

down the arms of a spiral galaxy, a bouquet

of ashes, reborn in the fiery dark

      of your mother’s womb.

 

A spark. That is all that is needed to separate

light from dark—lone ember

in a sky of coal.

 

You began me, held me up to myself, face-to-face,

made me bear the weight of my own gravity,

made me separate the bits of redeemable dust

from the vast expanse of cosmic waste,

a supernova brightening and exploding

its own mass.

 

How do you interiorize an exteriority?

Your eyes, wide as a word that can’t be spoken, they

reflect me, mirrored image before an astronomer’s

gaze, seeing what was perennially unseen in the

fixed, deep-rooted stars of your eyes—the chaos,

     the cosmos, the inchoate constellation,

of an entire life.

 

How do you make totality from temporality,

the ephemera of your wide-eyed dance endure—

your almost too-small shoes chasing

phantoms on the floor.

 

If sound could some day rise down, I might apprehend

the transient wanderings of your voice,

      vaporized

in the fleeting tension of a laugh. What faces I might

find there between the spaces of a coil too worn

to spring open, and what images might emerge

beyond the pull of the event horizon,

its dark and silent memories awoken

in the detritus of the stars.

 

   And you, then, you who grew from seed

to flower, from energy to matter, a genesis

wrapped in the revelation of my own mortality,

could you presence that totality—the angel

an elegy once promised, say

the unsayable, the pure draft?

 

Could you bend the stars down to me again, wrap me

in the warmth of that childhood skin, which—

enveloped in the womb-like curves of that first home—

oversimplified the cosmos,

            where time unfolded in tendrils

      of shadow motion

over the street corners that circumscribed our world,

its cul-de-sac center sheltered as a pearl deep inside

the heart of an ivory dark.

 

Now, the mute stasis of a different dark surrounds me.

A memory, creeping out, reaching in, crippled hands

  once held, clutching broken things

so openly,

  frail fingers vanishing where thick absence breathes

so tangibly,

the indeterminate immediate, the intimate immensity,

an immemorial horizon drawing me down

   where the ground fails to come—

   to come to that memory,

   to that fragile space where we had lived

so tenderly.

 

  You, too,

drawn taller as toward a siren in the soundless

vacancy of sky, stretched by the strength of your

cellular desire, already and forever departing, the thin

space between us dividing as your very cells.

 

I see you at the iron gates of their institutions, see you

in the rooms with their orderly rows aligned in

broad blank spaces, pressed forward in the progress

of their generations, spirits sorely worn.

   There, too,

the choir calls and manifests a new monasticism,

where their heads, turned from the heavens, reproduce

the conditions of their own disjunction.

 

Yet, even as my mind, immersed in your impermanence,

dwells in the untold temples of the future, caught

in the disenchanted current of a different air; even as

your eager dance anticipates the final repetition

of a note, closing it off from the seeing world; even as

the mountain slope we traversed restricts access to its

own horizon, losing itself in the sediment and strata

of generations not our own, those broad boulders

we stood before broken and scattered;

 

     nevertheless are you there,

lost in the dark forest of your mother’s hair, bathing

in the low light emptying itself through our bedroom

 window, basking in the depth of that

            inner event, that call to consciousness

in the buzzing hive that is your mind, kneeling deeply

beside the sunflowers and bees, nature born again

in the dark mirrors of your eyes, watching closely,

            intently,

 

cradled in that gentle becoming, that simple oneness,

of a moment—being there—just there, once,

and never again.

 

          ***

   There, in a distance all too finite,

a distance we walk but once, the flashing base of a

platform waits, arrows directing us, conducting

       their disarray, calling us, so indelibly,

away.

…..

….

This poem is from the book Totality & Temporality: Elegies through Time and Space by Ryan David Leack (Finishing Line Press), and can be found at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/totality-temporality-elegies-through-time-and-space-by-ryan-david-leack/