[Newspoetry] The Span of Life

[DL Emerick]

I've known anger.

I've seen it displayed.

I've even acted a part in its play,

And, it's just like love, sadly,

That it burns the one who feels it.

 

Maybe, when people forget how to love,

They accept anger as a substitute -

Because love is much too hard to take;

True love is even harder to give away.

 

You can give away anger all day

And know what you're going to get -

Nothing but anger comes back -

Anger just echoes its own images.

 

Love is not a flat mirror like that -

You can't see the other side of love

As just another, same face of you.

 

Life spans a chasm in love;

Anger simply loops back to itself,

Like a yo-yo spinning up and down,

Going nowhere in its gyrations.

 

Sometimes, we think life spans

When we are thinking of the dead,

As if a life span were a spark,

Between two sides of the dark,

One surrounding us like a mystery.

 

Anger is always safe in its spins;

It never crosses the span of life,

It always takes back what it gives -

The sparks of anger burn one up;

The sparks of love light one's ways.

 

Only Hope makes a true difference,

Truly, between love and anger -

For Hope is love's desire purified,

Not quite sacralized, like an idol,

nor ever scandalized, like an affair.

 

Love's hope is beyond all faith;

It also exceeds every faith;

Hope frees us from fear of the dark,

in an awkward willingness to risk all,

to give its all and everything away,

because Hope knows nothing stays,

with it, nothing is the same remaining.

 

 

Tracing A Logic of Spaces:

Contest spins against spans.

 

Topology can not talk,

Is forbidden to speak,

Of these places of darkness,

Where logical spaces occur,

Neither flat nor curved,

But waiting for definition,

Ever waiting representation:

The shining path of thought

In a looming darkness unlit.

 

Thought finds its solemn way,

Hallucinations in mazes,

Down halls it resonates,

And by its own path defines.

 

We all stand in darkness,

We all know the depth of night -

Just beyond all our sense of touch;

Are shadow's edges never passed?

 

There happens, just before being,

Just ever out of reach of any body,

There in the darkness, beyond you,

There's that, there is, and that's that.

 

We must imagine without fear,

What is just beyond us, just there,

Not an inevitable infinite void,

An emptiness as hollow as hell,

Containing nothing at all,

But you and you alone,

Lost in illusions of being real,

When feelings are lost on you.

 

Every touch is a good one,

As long as it never quite ends,

Never quite becomes just a touch,

A passing over of a flat surface.

A touch begins in imagination

And must stay rooted there,

never to come up short, to end,

as an end of mere sensing nerves.

 

Its logic spaces a hand-shake:

Try shaking your own hand,

And not your own fist

Clinched in its denials of life.

 

 

I'd teach people about love,

Impractical as they find it,

Because they seek possession,

To own what is never theirs.

Love owns nothing, not even itself:

Not even its own ego does it own.

 

You ask why people are angry:

they'll tell you a million things,

and mean, meanly, every one of them .

 

When you ask why someone is in love,

or what it is that they find to love,

they'll vaguely name a million things,

and laugh and giggle, in self-denial,

and say it's none of that at all,

those things are only vague hints.

 

Love does not know, not at all,

how to speak, properly, of itself,

for it never knows just its own, at all,

and is never so wrapped up in itself,

but lies, open to every eye to touch,

lies about, defenseless, a gift open.

 

Everyone always and already knows:

There are no teaching positions open,

Just pedants like me in logical places -

Spinning words into imaginary spans.

 

A good teacher teaches nothing much,

Not even, never, single truth as such,

But how things happen to be to go,

And nothing more but of their ways.

 

And when students go away, he smiles,

Just as he smiled when they came to him,

Just as he smiled while they were there.

Any good teacher is a Buddha, smiling.

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