#MIDDLEBURY
Black Storm Days
Joshua Edwards
As the best actors move on from TV
And leave shows in shambles, viewers bereft,
And characters to death or surgery,
So do I move beyond my yesterdays
Into a new life, an acropolis
So perfect it seems built to be ruined.
Like a swimming pool at noon in summer
The future waits coolly to be entered,
But disturbances of satisfaction
Can overwhelm the impulse of the act.
There are plants that die from too much water,
Some living things are merely suppliant
And others are born to be sycophants.
I reach out for love without knowing if
To love means bliss or merely drunkenness.
There are plans that vanish in their planning
And dreamers that drown in their ambition.
I doubt my senses, I hear smells, I see
Symbols wherever images should be –
A sunbow’s arc above a waterfall.
As yet the beachcomber in me believes
That beneath the proof of dirt is payment
For the labor of creation, or love –
Maybe not the gold doubloon, but a shell
With the ocean where a creature should be.
For the first time, you hear your lover’s voice
Singing a language you don’t understand,
And the words you once knew lose their meanings.
I am so confused by this new feeling.
My greatest fear is I will outlive it.
Everything seems to be going well, but
Who knows well when less is nowhere near?
There is such a thing as a perfect storm,
When all the elements of misfortune
Converge to produce a great disaster
(One of the elements must be belief,
The others should be time and sacrifice),
Which descends upon a decent person
Who stands beside some mean, magnetic soul
To hide their darkness in another’s light.
I am anxious because my life is good
And I love a world I will have destroyed
Just as the rotten persona I’ve made
Transubstantiates in the tendency
Of burning to offer upward its ash.
While my sweetheart works overtime this week
I have spent my hours alone dismantling
The appalling device in my basement,
But as I pull it apart it mocks me,
Knowing as I do it has done its work.
Millions of miles away, death from above
Speeds through the solar system, approaching
The planet where Mahler wrote his music.
It will be a defunct truth that kills me
And the sight of a serpent in the sky
Will be the final sign the condemned see.
If only I had despised the winter
Instead of the cold itself, I could have
Found some relief in fashion and designed
Warm shadows instead of a burning crown.
One must be well acquainted with the charms
Of decorative dishes and warm pies
To know the power that a caterwaul
At midnight may have over someone lost
In chapter nine of Pride and Prejudice,
In which Darcy and Elizabeth speak
Of poetry’s relationship to sex.
Everyone knows what happens in the end,
But the end is just a catastrophe,
The good bits are in the complication.
Aristotle can be hard to follow
But tragedy is simplified in love.
At first, one seems to look at a stranger
In the mirror, and life is love reversed,
Then their reflection proves insubstantial
For conversations and convergences.
I am at this moment in my story
And have no idea how it will feel
To arrive with another at a shrine
With meanings both joyous and saturnine.
The other day I went out for pizza
With the woman who holds my hand in hers,
And the roads of our hunger there diverged.
We ordered a large half-mushroom, half-cheese
So we could our own ways together go,
But by the time the waiter brought our food
We had forgotten who had chosen what
And feasted without discrimination.
The desire to know each other’s desire
Had overwhelmed the knowledge of our own.
Transcendent moments become memories
Like everything else, and maybe that is
An error in the making of the world.
What if evolution’s fundamental
Force were not endurance, but amazement?
Or what if everything already runs
Zigzag toward heaven and I am wrong?
What if a giraffe stretches out its neck
Seeking not fulfillment but pleasing form,
And nature is guided by beauty’s voice?
About this poem
“‘Black Storm Days’ is the ninth in a series of 19 1,000-syllable poems that will make up ‘Agonistes,’ an anti-hero epic that takes cues from Cicero, Byron, Milton and Hollywood apocalypse films. This section comes at a point in the story when the unnamed narrator has recently fallen in love and the scales are falling from his eyes.” – Joshua Edwards
About Joshua Edwards
Joshua Edwards is the author of “Castles and Islands” (Liang Editions, 2016). He lives in Marfa, Texas, where he works at Marfa Book Company and directs Canarium Books.
The Academy of American Poets is a nonprofit, mission-driven organization, whose aim is to make poetry available to a wider audience. Email The Academy at poem-a-day@poets.org.
(c) 2016 Joshua Edwards. Originally published in Poem-a-Day, www.poets.org. Distributed by King Features Syndicate.
