Pulled Up at the Sixth
Gustav Mahler/Symphony No. 6 (1904)
How do you go on
when the sixth wave mounts,
but won’t strike? You built
your tide wall the same way
you built the other five,
with stones and stitches
of memory, trusting to
your builder’s instinct
that the cement will hold,
the wall reach up
to its accustomed heights
so you can stand upon it
and gaze at the oceans
clashing in the strait,
waves building and bounding
to create new shapes of seas,
new veins of dark streams.
But this time the cement
turns sour. The stones
were strong but heavy
and unwieldy, having to be
hammered into lines
that seemed to stutter
like waves on the turn
of the tide, reluctant to strike
but refusing to retreat.
So you built what you could,
hammering and cursing
and begging for the seventh wave
that the sixth seems to inhibit,
or inhabit; becalm itself
in purely personal doldrums
until you lose focus
and lose faith,
down your bitter tools
on tangled heaps
of rocks and rhythms;
and looking down rather than out
see you have built a fine wall
around yourself,
that you might see how much
you needed to lose your toe-hold
on those weakening stones
that you might cross
another day, another ocean;
building a wall not to
break a tide or tame it,
but find new ways
of detouring its course
down fresher rivers
you can rest beside
when the ninth wave
overcomes you;
and your sailing days
are done.
every day another alarm;
each one telling you
time is running you down
and out, and with each ring
you are one ring closer
to the final chime,
when it will cry louder
then louder
but having died in your sleep
as you dreamed you might
you will be far too cold
to hear it:
only a neighbour
awaiting his own alarm
will bang on the wall
when he hears it
‘Give it up’ says every show,
every cereal box. Take a face
from the rack and try it
for size. It may not fit
as well as the one you were
born with, but at least you won’t
have to stare yourself down
in the mirror every day, wondering
why you’re as much a stranger
to yourself as you are
to everyone else. Behind a mask
you can believe yourself free.
Behind a mask you can be one
of us, the people who have lived
behind them for so long
they have mistaken them
for faces, disguising actual people.
Here there are no names
but functions; she's the cook,
he’s the cleaner. Imagine
what might happen if a maskless
madman – someone like you –
ran wild through the streets, tearing off
stranger’s masks and wearing them
as though they were his.
The world would be beautiful
but nothing would get done.
We’d sit in the park, remarking
how lovely the snails look; how quietly
they make love in the grass.
We knifed the grassy heads
of the spring strawberries
to cream-bathe after the lamb.
But hours later, scraping fat
into the pedal bin,
I could still smell the summer fruit
the same way I always smell
the last days of summer:
the sense of the year moving on,
whether we would move
or not. Sitting on a wooden bench,
skin bared to the sun, admitting
defeat as cause, not consequence.
Acknowledging that the mystery
will deepen as it always has,
on cue. And we the mystified
can do nothing but deepen
beside it, though we sit forever
on our unvarnished benches
watching the earth watching us go,
content that our passing will pass.
Though only one of us
will smell the spring strawberries
assembling next year’s crop.
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