William Everson

William Everson [Janjaap Dekker]

from William Everson's The Integral Years: Poems 1966-1994:

Sixty Five

I stand in the center of a twilight field,

Distantly circled by dark woods,

But the woods hold no fear.

                                         The meaning

Turns on an emptiness of space, of vague half-light,

The shadowless dusk beyond sundown.

                                                            My awareness

Is clear, the sense of subsistent identify

Distinct and whole. But there is nothing to apprehend,

Nothing save the circling space

And the weightless air.

                                   What comes home

Is the total absence of force, the suspension of power,

Any capacity to make. Not paralysis,

Rather the dispersal of focus, as if the spirit

Retained unimpaired its powers of perception,

But the counter-thrust of brute causation,

Or the dramatic synthesis of form,

Have ineluctably passed.

                                      I think:

This is the ghost-state — to behold reality

But no longer affect it. Soon comes the clinging

To what is no more, the ineffectual

Fumbling of shards of experience.

Like King Arthur’s ghost,

Dabbling his hands in Dozmare pool,

Groping the memory of a fabulous sword

That once was his all.

                                 I awake in chagrin,

Curled in a foetal suspension, afloat in time,

Hugging a sense of enigmatic loss.

A pulsation of pain, relinquishment

Of all the incisive forms I stood yet to create,

Drifts through me. Not the pang of death,

For death holds no terror. Rather,

The passing of rapacious joy, that appetitive

Sensuality and intellective thirst

Our slaking of which yields all we know

Of basal impulse: all we can keep

In heaven, or all we can hug

In hell: the signal

Instinct, the sovereign spirit,

The sceptral mind.