Endurance
Brutus, 26/1/09
"is the ultimate virtue—more,
the essential thread
on which existence is strung
when one is stripped to nothing else
and not to endure is to end in despair.”
---
I
cold floors
bleak walls
another anteroom:
another milestone behind,
fresh challenges ahead:
in this hiatus
with numb resolution
I coil my energies
and wait.
---
II
stripped to the waist
in ragged pantaloons
long ago I sweated over bales,
my stringy frame—strained—
grew weary but sprang back
stubbornly
from exhaustion:
the lashes now,
and the labors are different
but still demand,
wound and stretch to breaking point:
and I still snap back, stubbornly.
---
III
All day a stoic
at dawn I wake, eyelids wet
with tears shed in dreams.
---
IV
My father, that distant man,
gray hair streaked with silver,
spoke of St. Francis of Assisi
with a special timbre in his voice:
loved him not, I think, for the birds
circling his head, nor the grace
of that threadbare, fusty gown
but for his stigmata: the blood
that gleamed in the fresh wounds
on his palms and insteps:
in my isolated cell in prison,
the bullet wound in my side still raw,
those images afflicted me.
---
V
when we shook hands in the Athenian dusk
it closed a ring that had opened twenty-four years before
when a wisp of off-key melody had snaked into my gray cell
whistled by a bored guard in the sunlit afternoon outside:
it circled the gray walls like a jeweled adder
bright and full of menace and grew
to a giant python that encircled me, filling the cell
then shrank and entered me where it lay
coiled like my gut, hissing sibilantly
of possession;
twice I breathed death, shot fetid breath
twice I leaned over the chasm, surrendering
till some tiny fibre at the base of my brain
protested in the name of sanity and dragged me
from the precipice of suicide that allured
with its own urgent logic
our hands meeting, uncordially, your gaze
quizzical, perhaps affronted
sealed a circle in the gathering dusk,
like the ring of dark waves advancing
on the island's jagged shore
and the dark enclosure of wire
whose barbs are buried in my brain.
---
VI
wormwood gray shadows take shape
as night drains from the moon:
objects assume outlines
and some backdrop is suggested
and still the nose of time, expiring, closes in
shapes, like bats-upended
hover and circle
holy men chanting their mantras
as darkness dissolves
in a purgatorial stasis.
---
VII
In the air pungent with asepsis
the raucous guards swagger
their uniforms and holsters bulk
in a perennial twilight
the sweat of newly dead corpses
makes rigid the smoke-laden fug
the collapsed lung labors stertorously
strained iterations of emergencies
thread the air like steel bobbins
stitching towards finality, mortality
corpse-like, in the gloom
bodies clutter the floor in rows
a gloom threaded with sighs
yearnings, griefs, and lusts
overhead, the silhouette of guard and gun
prowl against the discolored glass
men, shrunken, tears, groans
tall expanses, concrete brick, glass
encircle the harsh cement
dull gray against fresh blood
and a circle of gaping mouths
the faces swallowed away
life bleeding away, the blood pooled
only redeeming this crepuscular abyss is
one bright voice, bright eyes, welcoming flesh
one bright ribbon in the encircling gloom
long torn, long lost and tattered
but still cherished at the center of the brain
No, it redeems nothing
cannot stave off the end
nor offer any relief from this
encompassing gloom.
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