you say No with the finality of God,
with the weight of stones.
the flat click of a door closing,
the snick of the bolt, the turning off
of a light. no one home.
like a hanging judge, like a tumbling die
you deliver one irrevocable answer
and it is always No. snake eyes,
three strikes. a clean miss. a cue ball
drops ponderously into the corner pocket:
game over. no appeal. no second chances.
the box is open and Schroedinger's cat
is dead.
a whole future wilts like a cut branch,
each last green leaf curling, bleaching, turning
to dust. time stops, stutters, the film melts
in the projector. a book burns, each page
charring as it turns, blank, the calligraphy
of dreams unwriting itself: never written.
it is a curl of ash. it never was.
they say you cannot lose what you never had.
wrong and wrong again. of all losses
perhaps what we never had is heaviest;
not even memories to clutch and save
from the burning building. what never was
-- more lovely than any Is -- vanishes like frost,
as delicate, as transforming: the mundane
squalor of the world prevails. the weight
of all that might have been, now lost,
threatens to bend our backs unto the grave.
but this is Now, while in some later Then
the broken bottle's edge of pain is smoothed
like driftglass into harmless wistfulness
or blessed amnesia; pain like happiness
cannot too long be borne before it dulls.
pain has its curvature: we cannot see
past that grim horizon, becalmed within a gray
ring of despair. and yet someday
the wind may change, the heart regain its way.
-- GPL Oct 2005 D. A. Clarke