The Likeness

by Arthur Gregor

How can you live, how exist

without assurance of

or at lest the memory of

someone, something

fantastic, marvelous

always behind you,

a hand, grip on your shoulder,

a presence surrounding you

as a shell surrounds what lives inside?

Song closer to you than flutter of wings!

Word more antique than age!

Without it -- call it intimacy,

your intimate connection --

how do you stand vis-a-vis

the multiplicity of things,

a tree, fence, grass, person in your path?

Unless you find in them

that quality no one defines,

how do you love, what do you

whisper, what song

do you share in the dark?

Without it I am as someone

lost from his caravan,

a sandstorm whipping him,

someone out to find him on a frozen sea,

man alone on a waste of ice

imagining, as the vast and hazy

emptiness absorbs him,

a tattered though victorious

humanity coming toward him,

soldiers linking arms,

a populace with banners

singing and beating drums.

Without it

I am cut off.

I await its sound.

I ravage memory

for sight of it, its melody.

I shape with bare

and desperate hands

its likeness in myself.