Suppose It Had Mattered 

Suppose it had mattered--

Our usual fumble,

Usual tremble,

The thousand missed steps

Of an average day--

Or suppose the foolish secrets we shared,

There in our drunken hotel,

Were in fact the only diamonds

In a vast empty mine;

And the words we spoke,

Beside those cracked 

Flickering walls, 

What if they too

Mattered,

What if those very words 

Might have lit up the path,

Lit up our lives,

Lit up the dark of our lives?

I have tried,

But retrieved only tatters

From our great embroidered dream;

Shamelessly I have scraped up pieces of dreams,

Like an addict bent on scraping--

But slowly the memories fade,

Engravings in the wind--

Memories of your smiles,

Pale but burning eyes,

Dancing in the light of falling snow,

Further away now,

Like a boat sailing.

And I wonder finally,

Was our love merely dementia--

For that is what I’ve heard

From the choir of 

Old men in my mind.

They are right, of course--

They are always right,

Cynical old bastards--

I’ve never known them to be wrong about anything.

To them life is like a single day

Replayed forever,

Nothing surprises them;

They know madness for madness,

Folly for folly,

Youth for youth, 

And I should not expect them

To be mistaken this time.

But who knows?

Supppose after all

Our dementia did possess a mysterious dignity;

Suppose some mad moments

Ought not be forgotten--

Delicate bridges

Back to ourselves;

And suppose after all

Our discovery was real

There in the dream hotel,

And all the tired wisdom

Of that tired choir

Meant nothing,

Except missed steps,

And an endless fumbling

Of hands.