History is the noise behind us...

Turn around and what do you hear?
the old master mumbling to himself
spending his final years tying knots
over his fingers, schematising his ideas,
so that when he died, he'd leave the schema behind,
tangible, unalterable, alive . . .

Do you hear the voices of the dead
aching to be heard
fighting for their places amongst the living
as they never fought in life

Do you hear them creating space,
elbowing past their brethren
their feet crushing the gravel
in a rush towards a world left behind

And we create them
as God created our first father,
imperfections and lost opportunities,
the disappointments of a lifetime
exposed as they never were in life

Working out the matrices of their lives
like a chess master playing himself
no one to turn to but ourselves
the answers already written
the moves up to us.

June-July 1999

The Light End of Days

Who lives the light end of days like this -
Caught between the desire for warmth
And the need for flight.

Who understands our need for victims -
Our need for sacrifice
The living with their hurt eyes
The dead in their passive resistance

Who knows how we look back
Arranging year after long year
Each in itself getting shorter
Creating a cacophony of images

The sound turned off
Except for a voice
Providing the narrative
That never was, that never will be

Then it abruptly stops
When words are not enough
When words are there are
When the voice you tire of is your own

The Essence of Knowing

for Matthew

In the last days of the first years of our lives
We grow into personhood
As an apple ripens into its essence
Without pressure of conformity
Or fear of rejection

We grow into difference
As a spore rides the wind
Without thought of sameness or similarity
Without knowing the latitude or longitude
We flow towards our final destination

We grow into self
With a voice as unique
As a snowflake in the first blizzard of winter
Joining with our brethren
Into a flame of white
Obliterating all else

Jostling to be the first
To make landfall
And an uncertain future
As we melt back into our mother
Becoming one with the root
Glimpsing the essence of knowing

The Choice

It was summer, and you were dead
and I went down to Barceloneta each evening
to be away from the apartment with its gloomy
courtyard rooms, smells of Catalan cooking
and voices wafting through open windows

Better the stares than the half-hearted
voyeuristic eavesdropping
the humidity that clung to the walls
draping itself over the cot as I
lay in the twilight of my narrow room
staring at the ceiling

It was summer, and the evenings stretched
into the Mediterranean beyond the islands
where a student told me you can still recognise
a descendent of a convertido by his surname,
like a smell that lingers
in an overcoat that one's too fatigued to notice

You were dead, and in the heat
I disrobed the men with your colouring, leaning over
the bridge counting how many cars
passed each minute, anticipating the seconds
between one step further
and the next one past

^

Biography

Susan Schreibman was born in New York and studied
there before travelling to Ireland to complete her
postgraduate and doctoral studies. She currently
lectures in the New Jersey Institute of Technology
in Newark. Her poetry has appeared in many fine
journals and periodicals and she was previously
published in EA 3