So a few days ago I was listening to the audiobook version of Thirteen Moons by Charles Frazier. What a beautiful thing. It begins:

There is no scatheless rapture. Love and time put me in this condition. I’m leaving soon for the Nightland, where all the ghosts of men and animals yearn to travel. We’re called to it. I feel it pulling at me, same as everyone else. It is the last unmapped country, and a dark way getting there. A sorrowful path. And maybe not exactly Paradise at the end.

Now I’m not evangelizing that character’s metaphysic. But I felt called to make my own uphill assault on that word, Nightland, and see what words might appear. So let that serve as epigraph, is my point.

Nightland

When we are alive, everything is easy.
Hair can be touched with fingers
that have learned about thorns
and roses have a scent that the mind
isn’t forced to imagine. Clouds appear
and pass slowly, so we only need to look.
In life — Dear God — there are oranges,
rivers, violins, and hours just
waiting for the bread to rise.

In the Nightland, years go by
in a struggle just to remember
these gifts. There is no fruit
no sense of taste, no gentle breeze to bring
the clouds toward us from the sea.
We spend a century imagining 
brown hair tucked behind a girl’s ear,
then go on dreaming of papers
tacked to a crumbling wall.
Because now we are merely dreams
that never end but are always fading,
slowly forgetting the living world. 

Kyle Kimberlin
March 5, 2014

Nightland by Kyle Kimberlin is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

I posted this poem on 12.30.2013, then did a substantial re-write.

Better? Less obscure?

At Year’s End

I had one task, to testify, to bear witness
to the love of life and the itch toward death.
In my hesitant quest for words
and their order, there there must be something
I have overlooked. I still don’t understand.

The tree beyond this window is threadbare,
Tattered by the wind and rain.
But when the sun was high
and bright at the end of June,
it wore a great coat of summer leaves.

Our faces are deeply lined now, hair
variegated gray.
We heave from the chair with a groan.
We stand and talk while dogs dance
around us in sparks of happiness.

Then why do we turn to the east in December
and putting the last of the light to our backs,
why do we lie down and sleep?

At Year’s End by Kyle Kimberlin is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

I have failed at my task.
My job is to testify, to bear
witness to the love of life
and the itch toward death.
My hesitant quest
is for words and their order.
But there there must be something
I have overlooked. I never learned
the cause of anything.
The tree beyond this window
is threadbare, tattered
by the wind and rain.
But when the sun was high
and bright on the last day of June,
it wore a great coat of summer leaves.
Our faces are deeply lined now,
hair variegated gray. We heave
from the chair with a groan.
We rise and work and let our dogs
dance around us in sparks of happiness.
At last, the mystery: we turn
to the east, lie down and sleep.

At Year’s End by Kyle Kimberlin is licensed
under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

What can we say about the loss we feel when others pass from our lives, whether by choice, circumstance, or by the inexorable traction of time? We can say they are missed and not forgotten, as we struggle to remember their faces. 

The Nature of Things 

You have been gone so long,
I can’t find your face among
the motes of light on the water.
I stop, bend down and see
only turtles asleep on warm stones.

Poor memory is not my fault.
Blame the noise in all these
intervening years, the heavy
traffic of storms and documents
and the world of vivid colors
crying like animals. 

We let it all slip by and fade away
and turn our anger on the dead
and lost and everything that did not
love us well and long enough.
It’s in the nature of things
and people to move on.

The Nature of Things by Kyle Kimberlin
is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

I posted an earlier draft of this poem – with a different title – on August 3. It needed a little more work.

I have done a pitiful job, failed
at my simple task, to bear witness
to the love of life and the itch
toward death. A poet’s job
is testimony and the hesitant quest
for the words and their order.
So what have I seen that I ought
to report? What have I overlooked
or failed to recognize? The tree
beyond this window was threadbare,
tattered by the late winter wind.
Now it wears a great coat
of summer leaves. The sun is high
and bright on the last day of June.
Our faces deeply lined now, hair
variegated gray, we heave
from the chair with a groan. But I
never saw the cause of anything,
so I can’t tell you why. We rise
and eat and let our dogs dance
around us in sparks of happiness.
Then for some strange reason, we turn
to the east, lie down and sleep.

6.30.2013

I Witness by Kyle Kimberlin
is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.