“No amount of fire or freshness can challenge what a man will store up in his ghostly heart.” – F. Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
[To M.L., his boots stretched on the fireplace]
From the shadows we watch his face
in the blue half-light of the fire.
Hear the draft beneath the door and
the fire’s dying roar.
The hush.
In this soup of lukewarm light,
Time loses its tick,
And the coal-flames simmer, simmer and leap,
Halfway indifferent, half complete.
He is flesh with fleshly features.
Stoke the fire,
The flesh appears,
He’s flesh with fleshly features
Now the ghostling fades away,
Yet the eye aware and turned my way,
the lips aware –
If – the trembling “if”.
Nonetheless. . .
it would be agony and bliss.
In the mean of catharsis,
Culmination and ruin
At last in our bellies
When the cracked sky falls about our ears;
The ringing of pottery strikes the pavement
Forever time in time
Frozen
But alas.
The fire is dead
The shutter bangs
The wind whistles
Weak and cold
I climb
to bed.