1 Confession
How much effort I spent in the inculcation
of ideals to my children.
The more abstract, I thought, the better,
because least corruptible, and yet,
and this the conundrum I cannot plumb:
the more abstract they were, were they
the less applicable to the corrupt world;
and the world corrupt
because they abandoned it? This is
the parent’s fugue. I could not
allow entry to the worms of doubt, and so
held on, embellishing
the children’s part. Until the crash came,
the ideals fell apart
empty like pupae cases, and whatever came out,
flown;
like something the Customs ransacked
indifferent scotch from as a bribe
for letting through all the Greek stuff:
my ideal figurines.
To have erected safety nets: catch phrases, clichés.
I hold on to these. So I call this
mid-life crisis. It could be true, now life has become
a labyrinth, replete with swamps, dragons,
a multiplicity of experiences
it becomes impossible to wipe oneself free from.
To have no certainties left, my classical figures
backgrounded
by this dancing Siva, promising nothing
but the destruction of cities.
2 Testament
To circle day on day this mystery
of our lives, to say:
“I just lose heart.” As though the heart
and the losing are both
independent of us. We are just ghosts
that flit amongst buildings –
the city of giants we wander through –
a left-over from civilization.
How, once, we could aspire to
a major chord, a moving act….
Some say: “You have the feel of greatness…”
and then that qualifier: “… gone off.”
To wonder if these buildings we call our own
are hoardings hiding vacant lots;
a neglect there only September with its richness
of ruin can compare with.
If there is a frontier to spur us to,
it is how best to live with
what we have become, acknowledging
the daily step-down from ideals,
the articles, clauses, that curb and restrain –
or, is it, civilise us?
All Gullivers, struggling to rise, on the shores
of each our lives.
Wherever the parody, the homunculus
of history, stands upright
all there is, is this bald goblin, in Doc Martins,
with a brain barely functioning.
Once, we believed, we could move storms, control thunder,
we now find we only moved ideas about
on a game board, a screen set apart from the world,
which, in turn, keeps reminding us
more and more insistently, that reality
is more than the distant nod we allow it.
Footnote
To be able to say:
‘Here I made a wrong decision.’
and ‘At this point, see, I was right.’
To say, ‘Here I had not thought through
to the consequences
of everything I was going to do.
A good job it was only half done.’
– but then, everything I do
has been only half done.
Then, ‘Something said five years ago
toppled my equilibrium
at this point, when poise was essential.’
To have become the kind of person
I most hate, if only briefly.
michael9murray 