An Indian Aubade
Last morning in India finds me in bed,
well after the racket in the streets began
warbling its dissonant raga,
thinking about those large bats I saw swooping wide circles in the sky in the translucent hour before nightfall,
blind but feeding on perfected echo. This was yesterday as I walked towards the abandoned shell of a school where
I once learned geography and equations, the practical kind that took me to college and beyond, into a world where I learned
to earn above and beyond my daily bread. Yet see how this morning comes again with its sharp hunger for a warm presence
under the famished hand. And hear, with eyes forcibly closed, how pale music once found via echolocation dissolves into nothingness again.
Note: These lines are in some fashion related to this sequence, also featuring bats. Also a previous aubade.
My Poems
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Leave-Taking - Louise Bogan
I do not know where either of us can turn
Just at first, waking from the sleep of each other.
I do not know how we can bear
The river struck by the gold plummet of the moon,
Or many trees shaken together in the darkness.
We shall wish not to be alone
And that love were not dispersed and set free—
Though you defeat me,
And I be heavy upon you.
But like earth heaped over the heart Is love grown perfect. Like a shell over the beat of life Is love perfect to the last. So let it be the same Whether we turn to the dark or to the kiss of another; Let us know this for leavetaking, That I may not be heavy upon you, That you may blind me no more.
Note: Leaving India this evening to return to New York, with 10 pounds of books newly purchased, clothes, sweets, and a heart that couldn't produce an aubade this morning.
Big Book Of Poetry
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Sleep Talk
"As we get older, events of even a small scale take on larger significance. The heart becomes less malleable, as hope, that strange fire, drains from it. And then as apathy sets in, enthusiasm to stroke the dying embers back to flame wanes. Perhaps this is how cynicism, disguised as experience, is born."
"The lager question for you is this: what is the end point of, i.e., the meaning in, all human experience?"
"That we have been given a gift to see and feel this world, and irrespective of the suffering that must be endured, this is enough. The rest is always summed up the easeful sleep of death"
My Daily Notes
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