November 2023
Bio Note: I can't recall ever worrying my head much about the future—which is a useful thing, now that I have so much less of it. Generally, I've far preferred to live in and for the present, or in and for the past. Both have their treasures! "An Unbecoming" is from a manuscript-in-progress. "For the Dusts of Us" is the last poem in You Go In By The Gate That Isn't There, which came out in July.
An Unbecoming
The eternal bows to the ephemeral;
to hallow it as it consumes it, for it consumes it jealously.
Hey, you in the mirror, watching yourself age & grow ugly,
remember that the eternal bows to you!
As best it can, bereft of breath! Of what is physical & sensory & present.
There have been those you've loved whom you have loved jealously.
There were times you lost your way: pursuing it, not present
for it, forgetting how you were ephemeral—
chaining yourself to things & to bustle, to the must-gets & to-do
of what might have weight to hold you here.
Today, relearn yourself stripped of them, bared back to you,
to you only, breath & body. To your current of what feels, thinks,
senses—this self-stitched, this-tossed, ephemeral
& unstitching present.
Today, what an astonishment it is to be old; how jealously
you strive to cherish it—its stiffening proficiency of worn musculature,
the sweet, ragged persistence of your breath. To rue
& to savor what you unbecome—this grind, rasp of bones;
this sieve of memories; this fleshly sag—you, now—here's to you.
For The Dusts Of Us
There was a day we spent,
naked in a naked room.
There was a window,
and a moment when you blocked the sun,
as dust motes rose into their orbits, and around your carnal loveliness,
they tossed their crumbs of it.
Time tosses us its spendthrift generosities so fast—
so feast, we said, once, years ago, in our bodies’ language—
and here, years later, threadbare in a rinse of sunlight,
lovely and spent and flicker-rich with shadows,
comes our conjuring, conjoined ghost to swear to it again.
What’s any now without what we append,
wild hope and wild memory,
our years of dusts we’ve come to and come still?
So much so, that when I die,
watching my life pass small before me,
how might I even know myself?
Chastened of our what nexts to the nubs,
who might we take ourselves for—
so have we claimed as ours these soft, swirled afterlives,
this gold debris time washes in?
Where let the one long moment of what lasts—
torn off and off like some perpetually lost wager—
rain on us world without end its blessings’ tickertape:
o lie, o sweet parade, o luminous redemption.
©2023 Derek Kannemeyer
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