You gotta be kidding - A CanyonWind love poem?

CanyonWind · Posted: Mon Jun 23, 2008 4:26 pm Post subject:

Wrote this quite a while ago:

The skull of the great bear in the museum drawer
Had waited ten thousand years
Among rocks in the earth
While seasons swept by above
And roots crept downward

Drained of the temper of hot blooded things
Sleeping a mineral sleep
The life gone elsewhere
Or vanished into soil long ago
As the twisted molecules that made its kind
Slowly unraveled
In glacier shadow

The curator pointed to an indentation
Above the braincase
Some weapon had bashed in the skull
A man like myself had faced this creature in unequal combat
Armed with a rock tied to a stick
And scored a single blow

Look closer, said the curator
The shattered bone had stitched together
The wound had healed
The great bear did not die
When the skull caved in

We have no idea, he said,
What happened to the man.

The life before,
The sudden death or long life after
Given to the whistling wind
That sweeps up the aspen slopes
To the shores of a mountain lake
Where the skull was found
By men of another age

I shall leave nothing so permanent
As a skull by the shore of a mountain lake
A poem perhaps
Dry ink on disintegrating paper
Forgotten in the attic of a house
Falling apart in the rain
Forgotten in the winter
Of a heart that once knew spring

This, this I say against the coming night
Knowing the ice may come again
After a thousand centuries
Knowing the sun will bloom like a great red flower
Filling a third of the sky
Then dwindle and darken to an ember
The earth a spinning ash

The words in the attic require no echo
No bear skull in the glacial dust
Mere afterthoughts to what lived in the heart

This, this I say; I loved you once
You came from nowhere
Worked a magic
Vanished, and are gone
Half a year among a thousand million
A living thing knew joy
Summer night wind in the whispering trees
You were by my side and I was happy

This is enough against all coming time
Continents float about like leaves
The great rocks buckle
Pushing up mountains that vanish in the rain
Volcanoes cast their fire up
From the burning heart of earth
Melting the hidden fossils
Destroying the unread tablet
Long after the readers have gone

Time can dissipate but not destroy
I loved you once, and this shall never change
A monument of drifting air
More permanent than stone.
_________________
Folks said
His family were all dead
Planet crumbled but Superman he forced himself to carry on
Forget Krypton and keep going.
-Crash Test Dummies