poem:Raymond Roy Ruth Herbet

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"Raymond Roy Ruth Herbet [sic]"
- August 14th 2016

The back of a crudely shorn bookmark, Louise Gluck, "Poems 1962-2012"
Raymond Roy Ruth Herbet

Raymond with a languid finding of the 'a'
Roy and Ruth more sure
And Herbet incomplete
If it only had an 's' to start
A sweeter man he'd be.

...

Crawling back from the blankness
Promised darkness
In a thousand well read lines
But it lacked a colour, it lacks the blush
of light or dark.

The river was deep as it was wide
An ocean to most
Although I knew its shores on either side
Outlined its flow
And it glittered and played
And moved, horrifyingly so,
Its mass unstopped

And, for years, it was such,
And, for years, I was silent
A dam, but I watched
quietly and the shores defined
by the careful method of earth
that is constantly moving
but we simply cannot feel

The dam broke

And the torrents flowed and
We know their course
Perhaps I knew its end
Glorious as it were
The poetry of motion
Its curves, its grace
The momentous, clear
Dark clear

The reveries stilled
And I saw it gone
The blankness came
While in the desert
How apt now that it has come
Upon me, no blush
in lighted memory
But this

The red earth scarred
A chasm in its wake.

...