Ode: Intimations of Continuity
"There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The Earth and every common sight,
To me did seem
Appareled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore; --
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more."
Sometimes I wonder, upon reading, if Wordsworth felt
Truly felt
The worth of his words. Life and Immortality
Are weighty matters to compare
When a man has only experienced
One.
I don't doubt he lived; his writing speaks
For well used years and well worn paths
Warmed by emotion, and
Woven into that knotted fabric
Of Connection, human connection that creates the vibration
Of the strings of collective humanity.
Human – no other creature so limited, and yet
So infinite,
So meddlesome in their efforts, and yet
So brilliant,
So weak under battery by nature, and yet
So unimaginably, irrepressibly strong—
And perhaps this is their mortality.
Because the Immortal is
Alone.
The Immortal is in isolation
Inside his own thoughts;
Thoughts which span an eternity, and thus
Cannot be communicated.
What is a thousand years to us?
A day.
What a day?
A thousand years of vain attempts
To soak in memories,
Before we lose what we hold most dear
To the storms we know are coming.
The Immortal is Prometheus
Chained to his mountain of years
Bound by inevitability
Weighted by his knowledge of what he will
Lose.
Day after day, or year after year,
Call it whichever,
Mortality takes his portion,
Plucking pieces from the Immortal,
From his innermost core,
Leaving him hollow, incapable of life.
And in place of each piece he gains another,
And that too is taken, in its time:
Mortality's portion.
Love and Loss are a cycle.
They affect both Life and Immortality,
As unchangeably as breathing,
In, out,
The constant.
But Life is Life because of that speck of uncertainty—
Will it be those I love, or myself first?—
And Immortality is not Life because of it.
Because the Immortal knows.
He knows, and waits for each one's passing,
Mourning the lost openly,
Mourning them all in secret.
Because he sees his own future,
That there will be a time, somewhere, distant,
In which
Every
Single
One
Is gone.
But that is continuity, isn't it?
Some things must go on forever, unchanged—
But no,
Not unchanged.
Unaged, unweakened, untouched by Time and mortality's corruption.
But not unchanged, not untouched
By That Mortal, and that thing they call
Life.
Because there will always be That One
Who is never completely gone.
And that One gives the Immortal…
Life.
That One
Is why the Immortal allows himself
A pleasure here and there;
Is why he allows himself to love
What he knows he will lose.
Because the Love and the Life are worth
Everything.
Because Love emanates from Life.
Because Life emanates from Love.
I am the Immortal.
And yet for a time, I was also
Alive,
Breathing,
Seeing,
Loving— connected and full,
After nine lifetimes of death;
For a time I forgot to see the universe
For what it was,
Learned to see it with wonder again,
And hope,
That blasted, blessed, optimistic hope
Only gotten from that infinitely limited,
Brilliantly meddlesome,
Strong weak fantastic human.
For a time, breathing felt like rainbows,
The scent of every color singing,
Wrapping around us,
Pulling us closer,
Pulling us along through endless gardens
Cobblestoned
A fountain
Dappled shade like a Monet landscape,
But swaying gently to our hearts' rhythms,
Everything
So organic it glows.
For a time the Rose was in bloom.
O! God, what a flower.
She is the queen of the garden, the Rose,
Red velvet and green satin
Diamonds in the dewy morning
Opening and spreading arms
To her subjects,
Graceful, tenacious, enveloping,
Lovely.
And the Immortal fool
Planted his garden among thorns.
And the thorns were coming in,
And the Immortal fool shut the gate.
And the Immortal fool locked himself
Out.
Forever.
And that is Immortality.
"The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight
Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth."