LAMENTATIONS

by David Eide

For one full season the poet delays the abstractions of himself. Tracks of endless thoughts leave him. Ah, brilliant season! A great world once dreamed in the chambers of youth is emptied into the soft and warm summer air.

World that will perish to my eyes! The vast enterprise of abstraction stutters though the city he inhabits. The poet, he says, only needs a few objects each generation. Holy objects that plow obscenely through him, like lasers with ragged edges. Objects composed of someone's dreams, anonymous and forgotten, yet a living voice in the empty city streets. Objects. Things. While ideas take a vacation in the northern regions where the ice is thick.

A man tells him that perhaps he will be privileged to look back someday and see the "shadow of your growth and development." The poet cannot foresee such a time. If someone from the future were to arrive and try to convince him that his growth contains the seeds of his destruction and that he will have to learn the painful laws of transformation, he would laugh the ghost away. "I see the shadow in everything that flies around me," the poet would say. "My words keep the shadow from me."