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ARTS AND CULTURE

Learn to live with a mountain between us

  • 27 October 2020
Selected poems

To the time remaining

What is left

of you, whether long or short,

hovers as does a mirage

in the distance

and distance is

the medium in which

you conceal your secrets

about what and how much

time that remains but it is

up to us as to what

to do with whatever amount

of the measure

of our lives we have

yet to use, which then

provides us with

the exigency towards

momentum in

propelling our aspirations,

our positive intentions,

the proactive propulsion

of our ascendant arc,

and if not our own

then whatever it is

we can do for others,

or at least another

other than ourselves

in either an instant

or in a meaningful

hour, the most fervid

day, which might cast

itself as a prototype for

another that may

lay the karmic riprap

for more after that as long

as our purposes remain

resolute, as may our

time remaining, which then

portends that whatever

the amount we strive

to appreciate and savor

the instant of our lives,

which perpetuates beyond

the timelessness

in which you only dress

yourself in appearances,

since whatever remains

beyond you is sustained

by the impediment of

your inherent calculation

whose restrictions only

limit what is bound by you,

since however much

you are and whatever

the time you are remaining

to whomever and forever

long lasts without lasting.

Giraffes

As Americans, we have learned to live with

a mountain between us that we look up at every day.

Some live on one side of it and some live on another,

as two herds of giraffes might live on a savannah, dotted

with trees. We might have learned that we can no longer

feed on the leaves at the tops of the crowns, but need

to bend our long necks, which we carry on our small body

and relatively short legs, and we have retrained ourselves

to consume the leaves on the lower limbs. As we are

nibbling leaves on the lower branches, we are still seeking

to feed off desiccated leaves higher up on the limbs.

As we browse trunk to trunk, we think of the other herd

on the other side of the mountain; we both have not loved,

nor have we found a pathway, both of us only having evolved

to being giraffes, roving the woodlands without ever satiating

our hunger, by galloping first in one direction, then another;

and we have not made much of a difference to anyone,

including ourselves, and despite bowing and lifting

our great necks, the best that we can do is to spend

most of the time avoiding the wild dogs of our best intentions.

A conversation

He says, ‘Think of your awakening

as the event that it is, that it perpetuates,

that its ascendency is as resilient as

a tungsten filament radiating with you.’

She says, ‘Tell me more.’ He says,

‘When I drive to