When First These White Walls Were New and Porcelaneously Gleaming
Spartan are the white walls were once hung draperies
And things papered, paneled, plastered...
Yet, 'tis so no more.
Now all is white and wan and sickly,
And the ghostly shadows of the accoutrements and impedimenta that once
Gaily festooned this quartet of walls, they are all that remains
To exhibit that ever they were at all,
And their shadows, besides like ghouls and ghosts and other
Macabre spirits, they are like the remnant of adhesion left behind;
The glutinous, mucilaginous, yellowish-brown stickiness remaining on walls
To which was once adhered some crazy thing-
Like a stamp or a sticker or decal or a glued scrap of paper,
Or, more fittingly and suitably, the scraps of cast-off wallpaper that once adorned it,
For so were these walls of which I haltingly speak once ornamented.
I recall somewhat joyously when brilliant sunlight bathed the room of a distant Morning, and all the white walls shone like ivory:
As do the bark of the white-birch trees that stand in endless rows along the linear marches of the great, mountainous, plateaulike hill that of a time stood behind me and this my house;
Yet that is true of that bark only of a vernal or summery day, and not and Never else; for it must be contrasted with the alternately silvered green of the leaves of themselves and other trees, to ever thus appear so:
That was the time I liked the very best.
It is gone now, supplanted by a dark yet quiet cruelty and coldness that I,
as the neonate, do not comprehend.
Yet, I were no newly parturient babe in white clothing and linen diaper
Swaddled on the days when these walls were new, no:
I was nearly a fully mature man,
And it is now something like eighteen years removed since I was the age I was
Then.
And nothing like the horrors of old age have even yet
(Save for in very infinitesimal, almost impalpable and imperceptible spurts)
Afflicted me with their terrific and terrible brainsickly maladies-
Yet have I escaped that particular curse, and youthfulness still happily reigns over me, but perhaps it's external, and the interiors of my body, mind and Heart are burdened by the onus of the elderly...
Howsoever, it was not of this I wished to speak,
But instead I wish truly to speak of the happy times when I first moved in
To this place, when I set up the things I have ironically still not yet taken down
(Save for those unfitting and unsuitable and inappropriate for my age and
Stage of life)
I recall those days when first these white walls were new.
Copyright © Douglas Cate | Year Posted 2017
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