Sic Transit

WickedEve may find a couple lines in hee that jolt her deja vu banks

SIC TRANSIT

By Carl Edgar Law aka JCSTREET © 2006, all rights reserved

The past is past and
that which is done is done but
time’s past passes still and still past
is present and fidgets

fossicks

in the yearning spaces, spaces
of the heart the dart

of you
slices more deeply than rain more
visceral than sharp butter on a morning crumpet more than

a thrown triangle into the sun, I

yes I
but you

are you I thought
a part of I and I you but
nevermore perhaps and that’s

what passes plangently the
lambence of your
crooked smile, the limning
of the light at night as we
falterfall together in a fugue
of limerance the glimmerings

of new life formed in love the

irreplaceable
unfathomable

connection of some dark thing
some bright glim of bondage something
half-sensed
but binding

binding and binding but we falter
as head rules heart meets heart
rules head

as a tidal bore, melding and writhing but spent
too soon, too soon
the clash of heart and head

besots us with yearnings and pain, we
fall bedraggled to more
distant shores

from which
to arrow discontents

until

the drawing in of night brings yet again the reaching
out of hands to clutch, the reaching out of
heart to heal

heal

but the head does not

heal

that which two hearts can heal two heads

cannot

cannot heal, we

wrench the scabs to wring anew
sweet drops sweet
drops upon the tongue with the high iron
taste, the
hot heave of heavy heart the

writhings of the heart

and magic

when all else fails then magic
walks abroad but fails at dawn, the grey

dulse on the eyes with its dull damp the
weariness of yet another sunrise to be
recked till night

brings on again the loss of love’s
fire, love’s
tormenting trysts, I

had a dream that
I did arise and go now to

Mongolia,
Mongolia where yak herders are in sharp
demand

and sally in the dun dawn slathered
in yak’s butter, wearing
a wolf-skin and in the beaten-down wheat of the steppe write

paeans to the dark
shadows of your belly, idylls
of incomprehension, I will

I will say – “serves her right” and then
relent and repent be
not right but contrite as the woolly beasts
whimper and stamp
rolling in yellow mud after rain and

at night

take my hurt to the yurt and eschew
the wassail bowls passed freely by
wizened oriental men

while women conjure cauldron things with the
vague odours of your skin

when you yielded

and became careless of your elegance
daring to dance the lovely gavotte of no mind, the

dangerous dance of chance
encounters with your delicious demons, your
night dreams and dream I will

of your wuffle-snuffle mewlings in the dark the
sudden shifts and flails of your light limbs

cosseted in your convent nightie and
sensible undies

of the deep sighs you make as you come into my arms in sleep and kiss and murmur

and fill me with delight

I will dream of the times we skipped stones on the surface of the moon
rippling out to Jupiter

into the hinterland of plasmic moss and marsh the
interplanetary fastness the
past is just the past until

it passes once more with the sharp tug of a puppy
on a short leash
into the softening heart with its
hardening reality

it’s duality and
lack of possibility

its fluidity and mercuriality
draining purpose

“go with the flow”, but what of the flow
to nothingness, the flow
over the precipice, the flow

to the place where marzipan congeals and is too dry
to limn the tongue with crystal, your kiss

was just another explosion of mint

until it broke the cobwebs that had bound me

to winter’s hopeless silence, before I knew
that you had passed my way, night and day with another

while I dreamed of you and knew
that you
were just beyond my reach and could teach me

to love again

and to be loved

as best you could for you too
wrestled with the dark beast
that dogs us all, the inner
child

unfed

un-nurtured and crying still

but unbeknownst for he and she

are buried too deeply in the drear of forgotten memory

to be called into the healing heart

Part II

Out there, under a skillet moon I
dreamed of you, how you
moulded to me, how I

enfolded you with my dark love my
imperfections, how I

failed to know, how I
failed

to know

that which was you and needed
to be heard and
loved for what it was and no more

no less, just
that which was you and is you, that which
you do not know and which
I perhaps knew more but I
did not know much, I did not know

much so
now I ride

ride with the catafalque of our love
each night

planting
kisses from your mourning greys
your kitten cats your sweet
companions, they

mourn for us and I place their kisses
softly on your eyes and
seal them with a scarcely-fallen

tear

torn from a deeper place than
you will know perhaps and

teased from me

teased from me by the memory

of your sweet small feet in sandals, bowing down
to taste and suckle

tickle with my tongue cuz it made you laugh

and laughingly we went to bed with high heart and
low morals
and things that we speak not of in high light but
remember well in twilight and the nighness of night and this

is only one of many songs to be sung and rung up
in the burying place of the heart
the hurrying spaces of lability

as the affect prances from disbelief to relief from
pain to the faint hope of a whispered voice on the answerphone

faint and fainter still for it presages only more
anomie

the animated tryst of darkness and light tonight
a borealis
of desire unfounded

I walk the high wire of un-
requited desire this, desire
for the un-named thing, the thing
we could never name that bound us

to the past the wake
running back into sharp tears of surprise but

bound us too in the high hot heat of summer in a different
clutch
much of which might have been

the sight and sound of you in your
long cotton dress your
big straw hat

running away from me down through the long corn until I
wrenched, wrung and wrestled you down to
histrionic struggle cuz you
wanted it, wanted
whatever it was
we had
down down in the long corn those

wistful rows in the high hot
heat
you struggled
because I had bought you two, one for
the ripping of and the
ripping off how you

squealed and fought
until I pinioned you and just when

you surrendered

I got a cellphone call from Paul
who wanted I don’t remember what and we could not

get that back
whatever it was
we wanted

in the high hot heat you whispered
icily
“treat me nicely” and
your whisper glistered on my skin with the lightness
of a bunny-scamper

in the high hot heat you sighed
“treat me gently” and I
didn’t
to your great relief
giving instead
what you needed

in the high hot sere
of summer

now

the gloam and glim and gloom of winter
draw in without your touch and yet you
are so near I

walk past your curtain-shrouded lair
where you rule on school for the newly-minted though
yet unruly

didacts of the future

me

in my North Face parka and
balaclava to which
my moustache sticks I see you
shrouded and bent

over your keyboard puzzling it all out and I

want to shout

your name

over and over because

I am a fool, a tool of the unquiet
heart

because you see thee
and me could never be
decoupled yet unruffled it is too

heart-hard shards of it
cling they
sting and wring

what ifs

you beat in my breast with the soft waft
of a thrushes wing you bring

all things to bear on my steel places they

buckle as you suckle at me and tease

and giggle

uncharacteristically

yes you do

occasionally

essay

uncharacteristicality

and this duality, this quality of abstrusity that dogs us

drives our dyad quite mad in mail and phone and my

unexpected arrivals in that old rusty car that shivers
all the lace curtains in the street that

redolence of your first
drive-in kiss but my

economic station
is of my own creation, though
mileage may vary

though I’m wary, even chary of the
clowns who frown at my apparent
cupidity my
not nine-to-five fluidity
of economic purpose

which were the deal makers, which
the breakers or was it just
the slow seepage of limerance into despond

the dull decay of beatings on the heart

the floundering of great vessels in a quagmire
of relentless restitutions I am

weary now of the past what’s
past is past and
that which is done is done but
time’s past passes still and
still past is present and fumble-tumbles me

into the pale now past’s palpable
shadows of relentless regret, past’s
memory of your you-ness, past’s
memory of you as water kisses swan’s down as
your face
mirrors my tears. –30-