Afternoon of a Faun

    Cupid's Bower                                                                                                           text - 11/15/1998

                                                                                                                                      photos - 9/19/2010

here, now, on this dry island,

i could live the whole of my life through this one afternoon and lack for nothing -

dry leaves and soft sand and the poetry of the stone -

elegance is not nearly a sufficiently elegant word for the poetry of the

stone outcroppings of this island

i could live the whole of my life, as the sun nearly frozen in the sky

alters its angle ever so infinitesimally,

here in this miniature paradise, roaming across and around,

unable to exhaust the endless shapes - 

 

grains of sand, the dry yellow leaves,

beaches piled with innumerable pebbles to be cataloged and fondled between thumb and finger on an afternoon that cannot end

here, now, needing nothing at all,

i might see a leaf slowly twist on the unfelt breeze,

look back an hour, an eyeblink later

to see the entire tree and forest transformed, 

each leaf now turned another way,

the sunlight now glancing a different direction,

and the river warm-frozen to less than a meander 

 

as i live the remainder of my life with no thirst at all,

an endless flat river of bright water just under my hand,

and no desire to drink

the pawpaws still have some of their leaves, and the sycamore casts shade, still,

and a moiling slow rain of little yellow memos:

each one says the same thing if i pick them nearly motionless from the air:

beware, you are selling your last years very cheap, they say;

but as i lack for nothing

i could hardly have been paid more 

even the wings of bees wave languidly on such an elongated afternoon -

i could wander through the shapes for ten years,

then start to decipher each minute flake on the rock faces, 

 

and i could climb them all,

a hundred or a thousand attempts in a row,

no matter, falling again and again to the soft and leaf-carpeted sand

she is holding me and i am holding her;

i lack for nothing

i stand in the leaf-strewn afternoon with my face strewn with her hair,

with my chest filled with her chest,

and we stand with our arms around each other

and no space between us, no space at all;

i remember nothing, look forward to nothing;

i've never seen her before, and never will again,

for the future has crumbled like wet sand under the wave of the present

O blessed moment

when all volition ceases

a short or perhaps almost endless vacation from ego's eternal gravitational field 

 

we stand

we hold each other

and i make no motion whatsoever,

and i know that she bears the burden of ending this embrace,

and i know that she has the will to end it,

and that she will do so momentarily...

                                                                          momentarily...

                                                                                              momentarily...