Pas De Deux

Who can say when all this was begun,

The leaping shadows, darting at the dawn,

The silent moods, dispersing, one by one

And metal figures, straining at the sun.

 

Which birth was which, and who and how, you said,

And why and when; you name each nameless grief,

But will she dance the woodland once again

To pas de deux with every falling leaf?

 

For she, who bore you in some hidden mould

And beat her anvil silently within,

Who, restless, turned you out to meet the cold

And sought her own vast silences again…

 

This one has caught you tugging at the heart

And fled within to hide her disarray,

She spoke the psychic tongue of one apart

To set you questing, restless at the clay.

 

For you have forged and wedded at the flame

How many wings to help man into flight?

Each twisted, turned and engineered in pain

In some attempt to set his mind alight.

 

Your women, neatly halved between the thighs

Expose the rhyme that you could never win,

And bare the pristine agony of lies

You wrote, before you gave away the pen.

 

And thus the one that tears the living light,

That bares each sinew, clawing at the scream,

What distant horror fled you by the night

To lend your hand to some one other’s dream?

 

What lifelong silence taught the child by rote

That all of life was bound in petty rape;

If harsh despair could catch us by the throat

In what would lie the seeds of our escape?

 

Escape from what - from time that lines each face

And limits every man upon his quest,

To cage the soul within each planet’s trace

While she performs some careless Arabesque;

 

While she disturbs each beaten man of steel

Who burns to raise his wings against the spell,

For she has wrought the silence that you feel

And none may gauge the fathoms at her well.

 

David Lewis Paget