FACES
5/9/2011
Copyright Gordon Kuhn
Poet in the Rain
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Traffic slows, and I, in major working thought, do then suppose,
To try, while the world is in passing, amid birthing, dying throes,
and life’s loves and hates, like ocean waves,
come crashing upon a waiting, aged, and battered shore.
But——for this my curiosity grows,
But for this, but for this, and nothing more;
To introduce questions about issues, life, and things that which
No answers for them can be found, yet how they in power bewitch.
And therefore, in the surrounding still,
as stubbornly my soul will allow, I do question and propose by strength of will,
Else in discontented pleasure of a mixture of regrets would collapse and drown
Would but sink neath the folds of life, and disappear beneath the waiting ground.
Oddly, then, in thought, I am passing the vision intact, and unmasking,
A moment——a spotlighted vagary, licensed to catch up my mind,
Profound and electric as it starts, begins to compose,
While driving and looking out the windowpanes of my car.
A thousand images spring forth at once from both near and far.
Nevertheless, it is the faces in the vision quest that occupy my whimsy this night,
And will haunt my pathway into the coming dawn which, then ablaze in splinters of light,
Will break across the sparkled obsidian garment overhead interrupting the stoic archer
Who, in a locked position, defined by patterned star
Has never let the arrow loose, but then the archer is no true marcher
And from another position in the sky the archer is slain
For such as frozen is when viewed from the top, the bottom, the left
For such the right, the front or the back the original does not remain
And such is the case for changes made to the faces of man and woman cast in light, shadow, or darkness, in the sun, and in the rain.
Those laughing, singing, those sleeping, awake, birthing, dying, dead, and——those in pain.
I find them looking back through the glass from the future, the present, and the past, from up and from down, from side to side
While in my car I do drive as the driver and as a passenger do ride.
Does that matter in the end? The changes along the way?
Are we all so changeable from close and from far?
From birth to death, from smooth to being marked by scar,
I see faces along the path, along the lane, each a centerfold,
Each a separate light, each from a broken, shattered mold
Birthed in liquid we come as chosen to the waiting fold
And with a cut we are set free from the suitcase carried in that we all call: she.
Our mother, our vessel from darkness to light
chosen by some miraculous test of wills that for life will fight
But, I pray thee, think a moment, what if in the fevered search another egg or sperm were there
And they instead had formed a singular conceptive pair
Where would our position, our world, our own star be then?
And what of that pesky problem some like to call “original sin”.
Our birthright in cell chosen made from some divine process we all suppose,
But do you truly know, do the faces really show what was taught,
And what was learned before in death we all repose?
Poet in the Rain 