Summer-Brief
Poets sometimes live long, long lives--like Goethe--for a human, full of time.
Illusory long life! For all mortals, even longest-living, are summer-brief.
Other poets die more sadly young. Drowned like Shelley; or, like Pushkin,
Shot in an unsought duel. Or like Keats, dead of disease.
Or--shuddering mystery of fearful fate!--
Of suicide's hair-raising path:
Like Thomas Chatterton, or like Sylvia Plath.
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I remember a moist winter window, with my finger tracing
Words--wonderful wings--on the ghostly film on the glass;
Long, long lines of thoughts and dreams. Then, with a swift pass
Of my hand, all those lines of words I wrote, I was erasing:
Like time--that makes, and sets free, our lives for its sportive chasing.
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Season after season fills our calendar. Yet all is as brief as swift summer.
Like the summer last here, gone now--a flowered warmth that fled.
All our lives, not just mine, are galled with grief, and gone like a glimmer,
Or a glint on a glass of wine or water: like a thin shadow, spread
By the lip lucky to sip.
Life's passing time, to love and live--and dread.
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Summer days are for swimming;
And--for some--for skinny-dipping.
To feel fully the sensual reality of physical life. Physical.
Though we dream and hunger for something more, something spiritual.
In the deepest winter survive some evergreen hedges.
We pray and we hope: and, there are books of promises and pledges.
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My friends, though I grieve for the loss of the time I ought to have had--
The decades of life that cancer threatens to cut off and cast from me--
I grieve also for you. For every life, no matter how good and long and glad,
Ends at last in a tragedy as deep and dark with mystery as my own fracture.
I urge you: Drain your days dry--
There may not be any re-runs of this picture.
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Written by Michael LP
Revised on Friday, October 12, 2012 7:52 AM PDT
55 degrees F. Humidity: 72% Forecast: overcast
Copyright (C) 2012 by Michael LP. All rights reserved
(Copyrighted for my estate)
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