Immortality
You carried your vengeance beyond decease –
Slowed down the pyre’s cleansing,
Slowed down the soil’s, the water’s warmth,
Left total body change open to the senses –
Pursued your cause beyond its effects,
Stepped out beyond all examples,
Further than all reflections,
Forestalled all worth –
All kindred, all common links –
Seeking to frame a cleansing,
Seeking a bubbling stench,
Blinding off the cause, sinking the bubble,
Aerating the stench.
Since you thought that such a front
Would keep your footsteps light,
Sidestep the quicksand’s dam
So that you could token-touch a cairn –
Erected but unentered,
Tactile – taking an unbroken course –
Blinded wholly on touching.
The given whole, from oneself all taken –
The river whole, clean-bleached,
Its bed eroded;
Nodding answers from the straight,
The cogged, the balanced;
Pressing blinks for engulfment
From the all –
The all whole, harnessed,
Blasted, made permanent:
Some lichen fossilized
Inside a flagstone.
Sad lump beyond your strength,
Your total celebration –
Sunken, dreaded – an iceberg’s reality;
Prismatic, pricking some seeming velvet womb
That rips the skin when touching it;
Total cold, some shivering rib-case
At last replaceable, to thread and string
The lesser wonders.
Total colour, total glittering –
In nothing lacking save the power
To follow one another.
Headlong longing, and yet not in for pitching without;
A limb for pitching, unditched by gravity,
For wishing, jumping.
Mere within the drowning,
Jumping mere with burning.
Author Bio:
David Russell was born in 1940. Resident in the UK. Writer of poetry, literary criticism, speculative fiction and romance. Main poetry collection Prickling Counterpoints (1998); poems published in online International Times. Main speculative works High Wired On (2002); Rock Bottom (2005). Translation of Spanish epic La Araucana, Amazon 2013. Romances: Self’s Blossom; Explorations; Further Explorations; Therapy Rapture; Darlene, An Ecstatic Rendezvous (all pub Extasy (Devine Destinies). Singer-songwriter/guitarist. Main CD albums Bacteria Shrapnel and Kaleidoscope Concentrate. Many tracks on You Tube.
This poem is part of the complete collection; Speculum: Collected Poetry and Prose, by David Russell.
View or Download the complete collection here in PDF format.
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