The Veil and the Wheel: For Jane Eyre
My strength,
My resolve is beyond
all bounds.
All Celtic curiosity
Bent
Concertinaed
Up in my chest
Crumpled
Stamped
Down
Hard
And almost
absolutely.
How did I arise?
Where is the horizon
I wished so ardently for?
Again it telescopes
in and in
And lands up
On my doorstep
The compass is
redirected
true pole
Magnetic North.
Revolves not around a
distant ice-cap
But burning white hot
Around this man
This son of Adam
This mirage, this
distorting heat haze.
Scintillating around
his soul
Making him
imperceptible, opaquely glimpsed.
Indistinct
As though through
fog.
Do we ever truly see
each other?
First passion is
a myopia,
a veil.
Wrought on a loom of
steel, weaving a cloth of milk thistle
Not easily torn in
the first heat of knowing.
The second is a shroud of my own making
A mythological cloak
Of Golden Fleece
qualities.
Glistening,
entrapping in its bewitching curls and spirals
A self-made maze
of
dazzling blinding gold.
I want to be lost
I seek blindness
Let me loose myself
in this consuming Other.
The veil is torn
The gold tarnishes to
alloy paint
oh bitter gall of knowing.
The Shadow of
the myth I created
The Golden Fleece I
had robed my love in
Is a painted prop in
a school production
And I forget my lines
In the horror I have
led myself into
My mummery
My delusion.
My hand stitched
narrative
Unpicked
Ripped and rent
In two
Before my eyes.
O necessary Eve
How many times in
this act will I repeat my lines?
Re-enact the plot?
Ah what?
Do I not know myself
by now?
This is not child’s
play
This is deep water.
This is a circle of
fire.
This is everything I
know cut through.
Painless until the
deep purple ebbs
To the surface and
stains the furniture.
Inward drop.
The wheel turns
Deep in the black water cut of the pit.
And I know.
I feel.
I sense.
The malevolent depths.
The Stygian waters
and the turning of the wheel.
How it feels
to drop like a stone.
And be dragged
Profoundly, deeply under.
Suffocating,
pressure, so fathomless and cold.
To the apex of the abyss.
But I never see it.
I’m gone.
Exited.
Out.
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