Elegy Just in Case
        The end approaches, but the apocalypse is long lived.
        —Jacques Derrida, "Of an Apocalyptic Tone"

The river's down again, the boat piers loom
over the mud.
                        An emptiness so vast I can't tell
if I am in it or it in me.
                            As when I am barred
from my own dreams.
                                  Most of our lives we live
backwards. What I didn't say stalks me. What
I neglected waits in the trees with the vultures.

There are chasms in the words I have for this.
There is my old heart shuttered with denial.

It is as if the lost names rise now from the mud.

One of them arrives with his hands full of hours.
One arrives as a Luna moth at the back door.
Another knows his imagination contains his future.
Another, the eternity he dreams won't last for long.
Yet another, how we once walked on our knuckles.

On this starless night even the wind wants to be
visible.
                It is their dreams that have dropped anchor
in my own.
                    As when the boy in Croatia marked
the poor stone grave with a simple prayer fingered
with the mud at his knees, and whose words
trembled with a flash of wind.
                                                My own words are
dredging the river bed.
                                    The piers reach out towards
the trapped skiffs.
                            What they search for is a time where
our dreams begin,
                            the river mud giving up its secrets,
stumps trying once again to be trees, a pair of boots
someone must have lost overboard before the drought,
the salamanders emerging, a few glistening stones
pretending to be islands,
                                        the shadow of the heron
sweeping the surface, unable to find a proper ending.

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Copyright © 2022 Richard Jackson All rights reserved
from Asheville Poetry Review
Reprinted by Verse Daily® with permission