"All Soul's Day"
When shall we learn what should be clear as day,
We cannot choose what we are free to love?
-W.H. Auden
Here is a dead afternoon, stark and late.
The shadows fall heavy as the rain
against the sad attachment
of the darkened plains.
This landscape is remembered
as the sound of your whispered face.
The distance of permanent mountains
are shadows deep between you
and a heart held eternally at bay
where speech is borrowed
from dead poets
for lack of a bottomless dark,
and beyond it, no world or life.
But for two voices within
a room where ghost fire burns,
highland flutes play
on and on and on, and sometimes
sorrow sits on the spreading grass
that has come and gone.
The languid flow of time
in this space creates the contradiction
of being there and here
and neither place at all
until the call of the clock
dissipates your kiss, your voice.
But the rain refuses
to hold the light of streetlamps
and returns to its habitual
haunting of the geometric shadows
between you and here.
© 2003 Marty Abuloc
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