Possessed By Memory…Love and Hope. An Early Birthday Gift

IN PRAISE OF DARKNESS 

Old age (the name that others give it) 

can be the time of our greatest bliss. 

The animal has died or almost died. 

The man and his spirit remain. 

I live among vague, luminous shapes 

that are not darkness yet. 

In my life there were always too many things. 

Democritus of Abdera plucked out his eyes in order to think: 

Time has been my Democritus. 

This penumbra is slow and does not pain me; 

it flows down a gentle slope, 

resembling eternity. 

My friends have no faces, 

the beautiful woman is somehow even more beautiful as so many years ago, 

these corners could be other corners, 

there are no letters on the pages of books. 

All of this should frighten me, 

but it is a sweetness, a return. 

Of all the generations of texts on earth 

I will, sadly, have not read nearly enough;  

the ones I keep reading in my memory, 

reading and transforming, 

From South, East, West, and North 

the paths converge that have led me 

to this crowded, noisy place. This secret convergence. 

Those paths were echoes and footsteps, 

women, men, death-throes, resurrections, 

days and nights, 

dreams and half-wakeful dreams, 

every inmost moment of yesterday 

and all the yesterdays of the world, 

the Dane’s staunch sword and the Persian’s moon, 

the acts of the dead, unrequited love, and words, 

Wallace Stevens and snow, so many, many things. 

Some I can forget, but her I will never forget. 

I reach my center, my algebra, and my key, my mirror. 

Soon, but I hope not too late, 

I will know who I am. 

And I will Carry The Fire.