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?

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