The World Is Yet Young
While poetry and writing occupy a large amount of Clint Smith's creative energies, currently his focus is on music from rock and jazz to world music and Afro-pop, and back again. He performs in and around NYC both solo and with the Non-Aligned Movement, a loose-knit collective of musicians who play music from
around the world.
By Clint Smith
We're always appearing, and disappearing ... through years and years, and lives and lives, everything goes on, constantly beginning over and over again, and nothing ever ends.
Dickens
Prologue
As close as we can be
to wonder, even the closest
are in pain, even the closest
surrender to illusions.
I
The world is yet young,
It is we who are old.
Our Possession, a mirrored stage.
& we, cursed with Fate's novel
Involution.
Watson's God is an "outmoded fiction".
& the infirm seek redemption from the ritual slaughter
of gods.
II
& where?
& why?
If not Jesus,
If not Buddha,
If not Zen, Taoist,
If not Mohamed,
If not animism,
If not unseen inhabitants of nature,
if not love.
III
Summoned in dreams by a red fox to the fragile
edge of an ice-shelf ... its eyes befuddled vision,
head inclined to the stars, & clouds moving living
forms, ordinals of hand or discrete phases, expulsion
of spirits ... this world was collapsing in silent
noise, & sensations disappearing.
IV
& the closest are visible,
emaciated in plenty.
panegyric in the dusk
of war-horror, bitter reflections.
& the closest art is
hunger without repast.
out of time
never repatriated
or settled.
V
& the foot-tracks of the red fox left level
ground ... as if an occupant army left no
fort, medal & flag, just hunger, & death,
& destructive rations ... & silent noise,
& the fading white flares, & the case of
independence, & distal hulls, seafarers'
fiery intonations in hundreds of languages
mottled together, & trance-like memories beneath
an uneven floor.
VI
& where is the mind?
If the repulsion never weakened.
If the fear & deformity that's sought is
always found, rather than illumined through seeking.
VII
& the ocean kissed my face,
nettles of mosquitos above to rest today,
no murmers of humint CIA droneplane
massacres, just sprightly reflection
of green waves that I sin against by
not reshaping my vantage,
for my face, weather-sected, lingers in my mind
as the ocean, fluid & ageless,
illimitable in sight & sounding, nascent blue
in red twilight, absorbs the gull's
parabolic plunge.
2004
Published May 2005
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