Credit Rating Poem by Stephen Jackson

CREDIT RATING



The void beneath those sheets has been my great vault
A cave, a subterranean system
Where light, beyond a distant wisp
Glimpsed through a chink of dizzying elevation
Rarely penetrates. Here the shivers of an upper world are, mercifully, absent.
Here, only, the damp must of Earth,
The occasional strange music of unearthly places;
The glamorous foreboding of being where one was never meant to be.

And here is all that a long-locked room holds for a child:
Lost dolls, their shapes intimated in dust:
Carpets and drapes, their purpose lost in mossy blots
As darkness, like a stain, reclaims its own
And old lumber, its moment for joy now forgotten,
Is digested by the lumber of the twilight.

Above me, maybe, the songbirds and squirrels of the trees
Keep their incantations and lucky charms
(God spare them motivational speakers)
And totems, too – as bower birds might,
Or as industrious ants build catacombs –
Anything to staunch the fatuous passage of days.
And above them in its turn, as the firmament rises,
The custesy-puffy clouds of half-filled hope.

You’ll say men conquer mountains
Doubtless, as two flies might conquer a window.
Only I know the score.
Let me keep to what I know.
Let me be unchallenged by laughter, by the risk of seeing love crushed.
Keep me clear of this tender-febrile garden of earthly delights -
Attuned, rather, to the Great Prosaic of eternity.



Stephen Jackson
November 2009



...Come to think, my life was always an opera behind sound-proof doors. A Mad Scene was bound to come along one day.