THE ETERNITY WE KNOW: TWO POEMS

 

 

THE ETERNITY WE KNOW: TWO POEMS

Sit. Feast on your life. ---Derek Walcott  “Love After Love

I. UNTIL MEMORY FADES

Has anyone come back from this defiled form

and mapped out ways to get back to that eternity
we claim as heirs to, where days are as chartless
as the river stream that must flow to an endless,
ceaseless fountainhead which has no beginning?
There is no other way back except by destruction.

When every rampart has been carted away, we

do not pine for them like those we cannot lose
because we store them in vaults of our memory:
they are our milestones of an afterlife we choose
to build from achieved desires, fulfilled dreams--
these chambers of a heart that will not crumble.

What, indeed, do we know of eternity? Save this:

We are never away from it. Until memory fades.

II. FEAST ON YOUR LIFE

Although this invitation will prolong our wait

in the cold antechambers that we surround
ourselves with, we will cautiously accept it.

Why not? Sitting here, staring at a kaleidoscope

of the many faces we have constructed to meet
other faces, I celebrate a love affair with myself.

Who else will do that for me? There were lovers,

and there were lovers, but they held on to their
own chisels to pare and scrape their own image

of what they could have and hold not unlike

a wild-eyed Pygmalion sculpting flesh onto his one
desire, a Galatea of his rawest wants and dreams.

I will sit and wait for the feast of all feasts

to be served on my table, my head on a platter,
my heart seasoning a bowl of hope, a soupçon

of little mercies that lovers often do: a salving

of hurts, a troth of endless fealty, a promise
that the image on the mirror is finally, only mine.

---ALBERT B. CASUGA