The Covenant of Understanding
I
Since the arrival of
my third personification
I’ve thought it best
to keep a close watch on myself,
calling upon my third eye, the observer
I coax its emergence
from behind a thinning mask
of social veneers,
calcified by falsehoods and distractions
finally broken and scuffed away
by the uncontrollable events bound to me.
The scales tilt then spill,
dumping unearthed carcasses
long buried beneath
repressed debris
clawing at two-way mirrors
on dead end streets —
I’m here, sifting through mountains of psychic riffraff
burrowing down to covert oddities, strange instincts
like a lab rat I’m caught in it — this maze of crazy
where past and present collide,
pressurized between fear and hope
obsessively looking for diamonds
inside old defeats, those hidden
in crevices of mundane moments
between the rocks and even harder places.
in broad daylight, uncharacteristic of me
I catch myself scanning shelves
displaying tabloid magazines and bubblegum
malingering in grocery store checkout lines
resisting the urge to buy them both,
run from the store
making my sugary escape
into the lives of the notoriously ordinary
made garish by the bell jar of fame,
pouring over strangeness,
wagging my head in mock shock
even as I engage in my strange new habit
of collecting plastic bottle caps in red, green and blue
haunted by those I know others must dutifully discard
without thought to a life of new purpose,
even as I’m unsure what I’ll do with my caps—
anticipating the act of transformation,
I commit to it with a sense of urgent obsession
as the hoarded bag of plastic gems
grows plump with expectation
a crafty doormat, perhaps?
something to wipe the world off my feet
before stepping back in time
I’d better get glue, I’ll need glue
to keep it all together —
II
These new idiosyncrasies and eccentricities
manifest alongside the receding parts of my mother.
Paralleling loss with nonsense and odd consequence
Hoarding things rather than experiences
in reality’s harsh light both mean clinging
to impermanence, both mean heartache.
My tenuous capacity for reason
longs to take flight with hers
I watch her gaze glide
over unseen valleys and outcrops
as a stream flows over bedrock
occasionally fixing her blue eyes on objects
or places I cannot see,
remembered artifacts and carvings
etched not into gray matter
but deep into the expanse of her heart
for me, on this side of the mountian
there is only the vacuum of absence
when she floats away like this
I use the still familiar timbre of my voice
to pull her back before she drifts
too far from shore
I need her to stand a little while longer
upon the crumbling bedrock
of yesterday’s reality where she knows me
as one who still belongs to her
III
Few experiences in life relinquish their mastery
to the covenant of understanding
between heart and mind.
Even the empathic eye of the poet,
though valiantly preening and pushing
to stretch syntactical meaning
over frame and meter,
taking notes and thoughts to task
with or without the aid of rhyme,
she may not rely on it — the covenant of understanding
each new stanza complete,
the poem, is but a stingy reward
for plumbing the depths of defiant mysteries
leaving her to realize the covenant
is no promise at all, rather
it’s random, accidental at best —
barren and unyielding to soliloquies
of the heart in reason or in jest.
© S Lynn Knight, 2017
