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
The true pole
Magnetic North
Revolves not around a distant ice-cap
But burning white hot
Around this man
This son of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob
This mirage, this distorting heat haze
Scintillating around this soul
Making him imperceptible, opaquely glimpsed.
Indistinct
As though through fog.
Do we ever truly see each other?
First passion is another myopia, another 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 veil of my own making
A mythological veil
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 gold tarnishes to alloy paint and I see it for the bitter gall of the Other side
The Shadow Side 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 happy sin of Adam, O necessary action of eve
How many times in this act will I repeat my lines?
Re-enact the plot?
Ah what?
Don’t I 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 deep wheel turns
In the cut
Of the pit
Of Black Water
And I know
I feel
I sense
The depth
The black, black water and the turning of the wheel.
How it feels to
Drop like a stone
And be dragged
Under, deep, deep
Suffocating, pressure, so dark and cold.
To the apex, far under the water
But I never see it.
I’m gone
Exited
Out.


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