Thirty-First Birthday

 

I've come to the end of my valley.
My theme halts at the salt rock wall,
cliffs of the world, masks of my carved
illusions. From hidden clefts I call
cheap prayers to the shapers of destiny.
Long since, I passed some clouded, shrouded
lesson in climbing the self-made stairs
to sing quietly against the unwalled sky.

I'm camped at the site of love, loving
at sunrise, mountains rising awake
with dawn's blush, daylight painting
our breasts, bare in the bed where the lake,
like glass, doubles the world for two
to see. Magic yields to the levers of age,
symbols of maturity etched with clarity
on the canvaslike, rigid, untumbling cliffs.

With packed snow and sand I formed,
in youth's pride and solitude,the goals
of my justice, and chased out of my faith
the gods whose arms and armies of souls
might lend me power to work my stuff
in unmeltable memory, solid silver truth.
My busts of snow erode in the glare of
honesty; tears trickle from thawed sand.

This is my age: the thirst that will not
drink, the wing that will not fly.
I push at my ropes. I coddle my demons.
Thus can I fail, never having to try.
There are no saviors in my pantheon,
just stars in distant groups suggesting
tales of explanation: how they came to be
like broken bodies fallen from the cliffs.

I trudge to the new path burdened with old
luggage, full of old passions faded like
fallen leaves and just as useless to the tree.
All my cherished habits of self-thought strike
at fruitless limbs while all the hoarded
acorns wait and dream of oaks to come.
I'm blind to see this time is my garden,
that now is the goal of my yearning.

There are no homes for prophets or philosophers.
I cannot whisper my force in the crowd.
My threads belong in the cloth of commerce,
my arms in the common mud. The loud
chorus wants my voice joined in its chant.
this is my surrender: The angel mounts the earth,
plows the sun into his mortal necessity,
grows himself into a place in the wilderness order.