Saving the Gray
Suddenly over the sudden years
I have felt an encumbrance; I sense an albatross -
the weight of sundry uncharted days.
Times I chronicle today as if I were a wax cylinder
and not the broken spool in a cassette tape.
A subfuse goose whispers: Record the sky for me.
I must write ‘sky’ ten times a day
so that the abated will not be forgotten.
Yet how to keep a goose-gray sky fresh
when the days are so metallically shiny and blue?
None recall the monochrome stories
we once told our color-blind children?
They have grown beyond such things.
I have so little time, yet must set down
the legend of little boy gray,
his history has almost passed away,
now eyes have no corners to see.
I knew him well, alas the roads to that tale
are backhoed by cartoon rainbows.
History calls me out into the park
where a lineage of dog leads the nose
to a yesteryear, a brawling time
free from the wow and weight of newness.
we lived then as historians leading other historians
upon trails of immemorial sensations.
Meadow larks meant something once,
but now look at them, they strut like roosters
over the journals of the dead!
History cannot now be cured; it is far gone,
its prone, hump-backed form encumbers
like a speed bump.
Wordsworth and his damn golden daffodils -
as if we did not know already.
I hover over histories sickbed
my impedimenta droop like the dewlaps
of a prodigal deity.
Only a moment ago history ran through hill and dale
as naked as an infant,
its fields were alive with love, war, and kapok -
a stuffed, full metal jacket;
a saucily heraldic Kevlar.
I breathe into histories colorless lungs,
there are flocks of moribund geese tucked into each
alveoli and bronchi,
they have plucked themselves naked,
they long for the ten sky’s
named in my cinereal histories.
I shoulder this burden of faded things,
this molting albatross,
all the trappings of then and thereupon,
these I place now in an ash lined
and crumbling
vault.
Copyright © Eric Ashford | Year Posted 2019
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