It is a night creamed by melting darkness.
Fireflies are obsessed with secrecy tonight
And dim their lights cautiously, frugally.
Crickets and cicadas crepitate with muted
Feelings, sallying wretched, orphaned tadpoles.
I cringe from traditional horror,
Wincing with the power of concern.
Lest I forget, the moon travelled out of town.
The constellation was keeping wake in the outer
Universe, where stars were hired for their lights.
There’s a nocturnal feast going on somewhere
Dimly deep, remotely perturbed,
Beyond the barren brooks beneath transmontane lands.
I hear sounds of distant drums which are silent
On the shoulders of beleaguered cliffs.
They sound like they are being beaten by fettered hands.
Such throbs trouble me.
I hate to be the first to announce the obituary of poets
And musicians, but this moment stifles my resilience.
Darkness lingers with either fortitude or arrogance,
Reminding me of the desolation of higher, clammy
Terrains and narrow footpaths
Where they once schlepped —veterans who went to
Confront the beasts coming for our souls and blood . . . .
I plod on to the place of the throbs,
Accompanied by flickering lights.
But on getting there, the smell of abandonment
Creases my ribs and furrows my brows.
The emptiness, the absence of man and beast
Run my wandering feet cold
I felt lost — like a lone, withered grain in a deep,
Battered straw sack with tiny, lonesome holes.
Itches depress my glabella.
I come late with the issue of remembrances.
Something must be wrong with the night, the illusion,
The world, the fantasies . . .
Something must be wrong with me.
This orgy of wondering!
The night sleeps on with retired quietude, plenitude.
I retire as well, my bamboo bed squeaking with the
Deliberate noise of the fluttering tong of flame on
The wick of my oil lamp.
Each cup of silence I drank took me back the way I came —
The tenuous, lonesome, hilly, jagged route I had schlepped,
Drunk with the orgy of the wilful drums and the elated flutes.
My journey was meaningless —like a generation that hardly heard of
Michelangelo, let alone Bernini.