Storms of perfume lift from honeysuckle, <br />lilac, clover—and drift across the threshold, <br />outside reclaiming inside as its home. <br />Warm days whirl in a bright unnumberable blur, <br />a cup—a grail brimmed with delirium <br />and humbling boredom both. I was a boy, <br />I thought I'd always be a boy, pell—mell, <br />mean, and gaily murderous one moment <br />as I decapitated daises with a stick, <br />then overcome with summer's opium, <br />numb—slumberous. I thought I'd always be a boy, <br />each day its own millennium, each <br />one thousand years of daylight ending in <br />the night watch, summer's pervigilium, <br />which I could never keep because by sunset <br />I was an old man. I was Methuselah, <br />the oldest man in the holy book. I drowsed. <br />I nodded, slept—and without my watching, the world, <br />whose permanence I doubted, returned again, <br />bluebell and blue jay, speedwell and cardinal <br />still there when the light swept back, <br />and so was I, which I had also doubted. <br />I understood with horror then with joy, <br />dubious and luminous joy: it simply spins. <br />It doesn't need my feet to make it turn. <br />It doesn't even need my eyes to watch it, <br />and I, though a latecomer to its surface, I'd <br />be leaving early. It was my duty to stay awake <br />and sing if I could keep my mind on singing, <br />not extinction, as blurred green summer, lifted <br />to its apex, succumbed to gravity and fell <br />to autumn, Ilium, and ashes. In joy <br />we are our own uncomprehending mourners, <br />and more than joy I longed for understanding <br />and more than understanding I longed for joy<br /><br />Andrew Hudgins<br /><br />http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/blur-9/
