Not To Know And To Have To Guess (from The Songs Of The Erinnyes, Sonnets, Odes, and Elegies by Jay Noya, Brigantium Press)

1

Not to know and to have to guess
Staring at the mirror marveling at what’s not there
And what is there all too obvious and overwhelming
Staring and marveling and remembering what one looked like ages ago
What one looked like as a boy of four and five and later
What one looked like as a young man of seventeen
Uncertain of everything
Uncertain of the present with its daffodils and rain
Uncertain of the future and the clouds overhead
And thrilling summer evenings full of reverie
For dancing feet and singing throats and dreamy heads
For eyes and mouths and bodies
To shorten the longest winter nights
And turn the starry heavens
Into the calloused palm of a witch’s hand
With long crooked fingers and long nails
And the sound of an unnamed river
Vanishing downstream vanishing in the dark
The sound of that river forced itself on me
The sound of its water in the dark
Forcing uncertainty into the marrow of my bones
And scooping out my soul and making all alterations irreversible
A daily metamorphosis of wings and air on Monday
And water and scales and tidal pools and sand for Wednesday
The bed I slept in was a place of despair
Anticipated confusion to be dreaded
A bed that was a box in the dark somewhere in the night
A bed that was a box in a grave somewhere in the night
Where I hid and pretended to be permanently absent
From among my living parents and siblings
And other relatives and acquaintances
Who knew me to a degree and some who loved me
And said they did love me and who claimed to know me
But I already saw myself captured
And trapped in a discarded photograph
In a box shelved and hid and forgotten in a closet in a room
No one had visited in years and years of dreaming
And remembering in a box shelved and forgotten in a closet
In a room no one had visited in years of talking and moving
And writing letters and reading books and watching television
And thus one day had buried the day following it and the next
And the day after that and the next and the next
And the photograph kept its image
As other photographs have kept similar images
Relevant and living one moment and dead and extinct
And irrelevant and meaningless years afterwards
Images and meanings and lives erased from the clock of time
The bed hid me and erased me from the world of the living
The grave hid me and erased me from the world of the living
The bed snatched my memories and supplied me with dreams
And the river of my dreams
Replaced my family and friends and acquaintances
And schoolteachers and the girls I pined for and wept over
But everything could be replaced and was replaced
By the river which appeared in my dreams
The river which flooded every fissure and crevice and corner
Destroying towers and bridges and roads along the way
Obstructing its wounding and meandering course
Breaking up into tributaries one instant
And converging somewhere else again for further chaos
And deadly pandemonium
A river alive to destroy and alter and revise and transform
All life it has chanced upon because it had to burst
And deploy itself to assert what words can’t express or reduce to
A river of silence and death running towards a nameless sea
Unencumbered but by its own proximity to God
This river of my dreams has become my one true companion
It overwhelms me in one long succession of nights
Blotting out all previous nights in their sheet-iron cavern
This river of my own devising
Convenient because it’s wholly mine
Taunts me by its absence and the improbability
Of its existence during the daytime
It shapes sounds into notions and images
And fear has acquired names and shapes and sounds
Just as I have acquired words to match them
All the shapes and the sounds the river makes and shows me


2

Not to know and to have to guess
What one’s expected to be at eighteen and twenty
And later still at twenty-nine and even beyond that
One tarried accumulating years or so it seemed
As the years lapsed and shoved one onward
Despite the head refuting the warnings and the changes
The heart refuted the dreadful and erratic alterations
The heart refuted and denied the obvious
The heart denied what it could not deny
One read about the world changing
And television provided evidence by way of faces and voices
The newspapers urged one to take politics and politicians seriously
There was revolt and revolution and war across the planet
Soldiers and civilians died women and children and old men died
Forests went up in flames and the seas burnt out of control
And God was suddenly nowhere to be found
So rumors spread that he’d gone off on the road
That he’d taken up selling goods door to door
Rumors spread that God had turned his back on everyone
That he’d turned his back on the frightened and feeble and the helpless
God was nowhere to be found
The churches were intact and some people still ventured inside them
To sing and pray and whisper and moan in disconsolation
But God kept away from his churches and synagogues and mosques
The rumors had God on the road in a three-piece suit
Selling used cars and used handbags and umbrellas
Old women laughed and drank whisky and nodded
Old men went for the whisky as well and smoked
Till they coughed and sneezed and they also nodded
At the notion of a God in a three-piece suit on the road
Selling used cars and used handbags and umbrellas
It is an odious sin not to know and to have to guess
It is the type of sin that’ll take lifetimes in Purgatory to erase
And even then it may come to nothing


© J.Noya 2006