Because I Have Known You
21st Century
Because I have known you
In all your interchangeable masks,
Like varied aspects of the moon:
In mystic opened mouthed sorrow,
Your song muted by distance.
In sapphire haze,
Over marshes shrouded
In civil war mist.
As a pearl ghost in flight
Above furious clouds
Of gossamer stone,
Whose names silently emblazon
The ivory hall where your heart,
Which you do not possess,
Stirs in fragment
The infinite heaven.
As a bronze warrior
Over an ordered lake
Of swaying maize,
Where fireflies thread with winking spark
The twilight harvest.
Because I have also seen you twist
Inside your chains
Like a venomous cripple
On the side of a cliff,
Who rocks his cage
and foments an avalanche
to rain hell
on the tiny village
he has made of his heart,
which he does not possess,
and so perceives ruin
through a flaw of perception.
Because I knew you
Before your ocean brow
Of prescient storm
Held the shift of light and shadow,
Before your pulse thumped
In the dark water,
Before you fled constricting walls
Into the angry lamplight,
And felt the impossibility of it;
The tragedy that knows nothing
But to unfold.
I can now,
By aegis of the old emperor,
Who existed before time
Sent its saber slicing 'round
The smooth face of the clock,
Pass along permission,
As an emissary at the end
Of a long succession
Of ethereal war drums,
To dream yourself awake
Inside a sphere of rediscovery;
To shed layers of deception
And walk with strange blessing
From the death of the world.
I too only half believed
In this mystic kingdom,
Which has now to flare in rage
Over the desolate stronghold,
And burn away tin roofs,
And bind us to stars.
DayPoems Poem No. 2381
<a href="http://www.daypoems.net/poems/2381.html">Because I Have Known You by Patrick Boyd</a>
The DayPoems Poetry Collection, www.daypoems.net
Timothy Bovee, editor
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