Out of Exile

I am not a blank slate to score upon again Yet there is this gap, this hollow place That wants a name. I search for it in vain The alien presence of eyes, and of face Nothing comes back to memory. We are Strangers now, and the empty space Yawns akwardly. Thirty years is too far For memory to recognize what is it I trace For family and friends like fluids converged In a nether space that makes glee brief I feel the joy familiar as sky and sea merged But the change in people contests my relief For man have changed many things, but few As much as himself - and as if to hide before Familiar eyes. I remain old in a world new And hesitance now where once I was very sure. Time drizzled, drizzled, drizzled and terminus Came piling up the sands of days for the wind. Exile was my fickle way of escaping detritus The sand shy had not yet blown but I was blind And in the darkness where spins now alone The white leached of soul calcified by snow wet As unshed tears, under its stigma do so moan More than the coming home again, the soft death Of bonds, and the sense of proprietary loss. Who Is left to stare in my face blank and expressionless? And say by angle of shoulder: nothing here for you I see all my labor like butter in the sun, and I am less Than all the worth of man because the price of me Is trickled in the sand. They kept the rules the same But changed the game, and for lost of this efficacy I am poured out from the chamber, a pot in shame. For this I fled the foolish notion fawning in my head? For this I left the better known of friends? The mills Of stress do spin there still, the uncertainty of bread And age from time's trembling vessel nervous spills The unfriendliness to share because of a narrow dread That tomorrow stalk alone will not suffice the failing New. I was tired of my self-imposed exile, the shred Remains I gathered and came home to true trembling. There is only one familiar landmark, a true friend, this Alone give my days orientation to praise. My true pole Is where such a friendship in the sand storm still exist The lighthouse in the billowy mist, anchor for the soul. But I have no root here to hold me firm to one spot Roots adventitious grows away, and then cold excision The stem alone left in the miry mud to to swell and rot Coming out of exile finds coping a harder final decision