I remember when I worked the still of night
Alone in Youth's great fire, listening
To greater silences that marked the dawn,
Absorbed by the enormity of life.
And tireless I tramped the empty streets
Bringing mechanically the Morning Times
To sleepy homes . . . a restless outer world
As news, as human interest, inhuman
As it might have been (might always be).
The very smells return to haunt my dreams,
The doughnut grease, the coffee urn (rich brew!)
And sounds: old songs that let the mind recall
As it were yesterday, the fire and the toil.
Nevertheless what might be left of this
Is mine alone, it still pervades my soul.
So when the evening falters and the sun
Sinks out of sight I seem to read again
Of wars, of infamy and drowning men,
Though I when young had understood it less
Than I might now, still feel it in the flesh
Return to wrap my soul in wasted dreams.
So memory is dead without emotion,
A sterile thing, unlived and unreliant,
And on these mechanistic thoughts we build
A faulty world, or live it once again.
A paradox when wisdom is the fool
And all emotion seems but common sense ---
So in these muttered musings lies the source
Of our most flagrant faults and pompous whims,
For even poets cannot usher in
The memories as they were lived, turn back,
Recall the utter helplessness, pervade
Our iron world with flesh and blood again,
And see the sense of silence and the sea
Wrap the earth as centuries ago
Rolling in time, monotonous and slow
With weather, winter, waste, and wanton waves
That roll like Lethe on the crowed shore,
And smell the brine, grow ill with endless stirrings,
See the billows roll and gently fall
As agonizing moans of buoys swell.
Known in the endless depths of silence well
Those mighty fountains to drown this human hell
In everything but truth, in every lie.
As misbegotten dreams they were to die.
We read their epitaphs in abstract themes
Still understanding nothing of the pain
That they would have us afterall recall.
They were born and died as if unmourned,
Unmemorized, unsung, un-understood,
Unfathomed, unrecalled, and unredeemed,
Unlived, unloved, outlasted and outdone,
And gone! God knows! and utterly undone.
Jay Cohen