Thomas Lowe Taylor -- THE LAST LINE

***************


Here’s to the girls I knew and loved
& the ones I left behind;
& here’s to the ones I married
and the ones I turned aside;
& here’s to the ones I met &
the ones I threw away,
to the children I loved and had
and the ones who went away,
the children who died or disappeared
& the ones who never appeared;

& here’s to the tune I met too long to seem
for the form I set and the moons I seen,
the line too short and the time too mean
for life to bloom or the mood to scream;
for the time’s too tight, the day’s too prime,
& plants do bloom in the day’s sublime;

So here’s to the ones who fled and the ones who stayed
my mortal fear for one ones who played
to the moral shine, the eloquent shift, the formal line
the dreamier clift, the latent fountain,
the eloquent grift, the terminal scream,
the dreamier reef –

So here’s the mountain
and here’s to the grief, the elemental strain,
the informational reef. It’s a non sentimental
hour, an emptier glyph, a newer grifter,
an inequivocal stiff, a newer leaf, a shinier sheaf;

So here’s the dune and here’s the pal
the unremitting gloom, aforesaid or monumental

It’s the sphere and the prow,
the providential – the scum, the scow
all that’s left in the here and now.

2.04.05