Hieroglyph 14

Hieroglyph 14

I enter too often into your silence
And have partaken too freely of your thoughts' pure insubstance
You gather me as a cold wind playing with fallen leaves
And the light of the world now glistens in unseeing eyes.

There is a truth here
But I have not perceived it and if it is yours to reveal you have chosen darkness instead.
Never have I been so near to you
Never have I been so remote from any human image of your mind
And you will tell me that it is an aberration of the moment
An obstacle to be overcome.

But these twenty years of clear remembrance are nothing if not my journey towards your form
And the skillfulness of your seduction is beyond anything of the mortal earth
I must pause now to reconsider you
Before my hour passes
And I fall into the ambiguous embrace of your passion
A timeless one, you tell me
But you have told me so many things
And so much of it has been altered with the years.

Now, in this hour, it is the clear statement that I require
The great declaration and the testament of all time
The one and last word of all this world's sound.
And it is a vain hope, I know
If ever you were direct or terse or clear it was not I who was the beneficiary of that event
Or for that matter few others, if I read the record right.

I comprehend the greater part of you
But that is a phenomena of moments
And when they vanish you are yet again an enigma patched together of memories and dreams
There is nothing here that compels me, yet with all your persuasion I am still a creature of this place and hour
Surely there must be something in that, but it eludes me and I even suspect that it is nothing but this world's dull inertia.

For my part, there is neither love nor friendship anymore
My youth made an end to that and I have long ceased to count it as a loss
For I have a measure of clarity now that I lacked
A steadier eye and a mind that can hold the single course of my ambition.
And here is the dangerous passage:
You have been an instrument of my highest passion, and insofar as you have aided me I have been content to wrestle with all the contradictions you engender
But ultimately you are a secondary target
And if more efficacious forces had chosen to announce their interest in my work
Ours would have been an abrupt parting.

As has become apparent, I am as impersonal as you and as fully oblique
And lately I have come to wonder if from the very beginning you were not as thoroughly mystified and confused about me as I was with you
That would be almost too strange a thought
You, a brooding exile of my own daylit world
And in its strangeness is its probability
The single notion in all my universe of thought that was never captured from the periphery
The ennobling and terrifying revelation that neither of us is the victim here
Nor the supreme and ultimate refuge from the entangled strings of fate
But what if I am alone in the knowing?

Such immeasurable ironies are not to be conceived
Or is there yet another party to this dispute
You have told me of a voice
And on rare occasions I myself have heard it
If we are not alone here
Are we in sight of an enemy or a friend?

Previously Published

© John A. Youril