TWO POEMS: RETURN MAIL (OF DOTARD PASSION) and A CIRCLE'S SHADOW (A PENT-UP LONGING)

RETURN MAIL (A DOTARD PASSION)

“I an old man,/A dull head among windy spaces./…I have lost my passion: why should I need to keep it/ Since what is kept must be adulterated?/ I have lost my sight, smell, hearing, taste and touch:/ How should I use them for your closer contact?---T.S. Eliot, Gerontion

When I got your letter, it was past my hammock hour,

and mellow from the longings I had the night before:

you said we will grow old and the flares will flicker

 

but not our stubborn dream, reckless, an ignited habit

of holding on, a moribund troth of our semper fidelis

that needs must break through a dotard, decrepit passion

 

put to use only when desire overflows its bounden

confines--- unchecked memories of passion on the sand

underneath overhanging bluffs, trysts at wayside inns.

 

Perhaps, I will never really be able to take you back

to that belfry of the carillonneur where we hummed

our evening songs, brave songs, love songs. I am old.

 

Shall I trudge those seashores and skip over waves

with trouser bottoms rolled? Shall I steal those kisses

for an eternal ingénue and say: O, ‘twas accidental?

 

But like you, I still taste the brine on my tongue,

the dark seas still haunt my lonely hammock hours,

and your habit of rootedness is really a habit of shores

 

that must always roll the waves back to the sea

that takes back all the buried footprints, even love

heart sketches (ran through by arrows) you drew.

 

---Albert B. Casuga

 

 

A CIRCLE’S SHADOW

It the sea eats limbs of love, so love, so life, may not

to its eternal wanting finish what it late started must

soon deny: a clown’s journey through a circle’s

 

shadow, the circle rending rapture, where, threatening,

the Shadow begins what beginnings should have done:

to fill the empty cups, the gaping tables, with lilies

 

of the marsh, and vases of the Sun. But the circle

and the shadow uniting are miracles come from the Sea,

its womb and lilies devouring. Perhaps you are right.

 

Desire’s pent-up longing is brighter still, stinging still,

and will never, ever go away, like the homing waves

that take us back, take all things back, to a beginning.

 

---Albert B. Casuga