Keep the Strange Light
by Cam M. Roberts
Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust | Cover Illustration by Andrzej Klimowski
Your face, within a certain oblong
Distance, is catalyzed by a curtained dimness
of hooded light,
Seeming in a way cloistered
like an apprehended simile
or one too many slurs which
expose the wreckage of our words
as they cannot be salvaged
by their having, and the truth
has yet to be reconciled from our mutual desire
to break the chains which bind us in silence.
All things are let go in the grand scheme,
Even one’s own blood
is let,
let go,
blood-letting some call it –
It’s the healing that matters.
Imagine
healing as the mimetic image
of unspun or rewound:
A flip-book being flipped in reverse.
Blood being un-let, taken back, carried into, returned
within the inside of the veins.
I see her flowers with their dishonest air,
They implicate the atmosphere in this quiet room.
It is a gravelly night, and our moods are now in explication.
Blooming inward
as if we were – Together –
being slowly
euthanized
over this one
flicker of life
like a wish
we’d been granted,
or a sanction
we’d been sentenced
to suffer –
Without a trace of shame
nor any shred of hesitation,
The world is lensed in clarity.
And so, from the lack of annoyance,
I allow you to astonish
the very life
From my eyes
as opposed to a common avoidance
where I set this head
like the sun behind the larches,
and when all things
absolve to the most
minimum light,
the night falls,
and I crouch
both eyes
downward
in surrender.
I bear up my guilt in dreams
to where
it would beat the very breath
from these ragged lungs.
If there’s a god, then to her I prayed
in a sudden flash, and with such a violence
where I would imagine flowers in their wrath,
And question how by day they go on ignored
to the point of being, at times, stomped upon –
The Amen
resembled
the last bit of dirt
recovering the small abscess
of earth we’d exhumed
in hopes of resurrecting
what was once there,
a garden nestled by wilderness:
A collaboration of our own heaven
Which would surround us
as we excelled
in the art of reassembling
everything else –
Ubi sunt 