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COBWEBS AND DUST
"The web of time was spun deeply in his eyes."
Old he was, as old as ageless, and beyond.
The sclera of his eyes was not the blue-white
of youth
nor the jaundiced yellow of old age,
but as vinegar brown as the desert sands.
The soft wet fullness of youth had left his
face
and so too had the furrowed wrinkles of age--
flat, drawn, with a patina of fine lines,
mere memories of wrinkles on mahogany and parchment.
Gone was the cornflower blue of his eyes,
washed away to gray by suns unnumbered,
with iril spokes of dull copper and old rust
and a pupil as clear and deep as the well of
time.
When he spoke, his voice came from deep within
him.
There was no crackle and quaver of age--
soft without the syllabance of whispers,
as full and low as the moan of a twisting tree.
He spoke of the feel of a holystoned wooden
deck,
of the feel of a rope underfoot and his chest
on a spar,
of pulling seventy-five pounds of coarse woven
canvas
and tying off in blue water under a Caribbean
sun.
He spoke of the tang of salt and the smell
of sea life,
of putting tar on his hair to keep it from
blowing,
of the slow rumble and sharp crack of a sail
in tack
of baking suns and cool nights and a halo around
the moon.
He spoke of the rhythmic drum of his pony’s
hooves,
of turning his toes inward to hold in gallop
of the nocking of the arrow and the whistle
of the fletch,
and the falling of the buffalo in the knee-high
prairie grasses.
He spoke of a fine dry snow that squeaked underfoot,
of cold pouring like water down the sides of
the tipii,
of the warm naked body veside him under the
robes,
of the children and the old ones and the life
all around him.
He spoke of the wall of heat and sun bright
coals,
of the acrid fumes of iron and sulfur and tempering
oil,
of the streaks of fire--comets from his hammer
strikes,
and the wroughting of a casting into a short
lethal sword.
He spoke teasingly of the smithy’s pox,
of the white spots on the arms of all who work
iron,
He spoke of the stench and the terror and the
screams
of the boy who died when the crucible slipped.
I listened to his words and heard truths,
verifiable by the casual offhand authenticity,
the random details that could only come
from someone who had been there and done that.
Even so, young as I was, I did the arithmetic
and knew with my logical mind
that he could not have been a weaponsmith in
the 1500s,
an Amerind in the 1600s, or a sailor in the
1700s.
And yet I knew that he spoke truth,
spoke of what he had lived, what he had learned,
spoke from memory, not theory nor textbooks.
Old he was, as old as ageless, and beyond.
The heaven mythologies explained it clearly;
the spirit is bound to the life of the man--
upon death, it touches all other spirits,
sees through their lives, remembers their memories.
The boundary of death separates the spirits;
the living are not one with the dead,
The boundary is sharp and short,
a matter of a gasp and a few minutes only.
The old man’s life was measured by a cosmic
clock,
marked out in years, not minutes,
His boundary was not a line, but a field,
and in his slow crossing, he could know spirits
on both sides.
As I grow older, I ponder upon the man.
Already, I am feeling the loss of passion,
the serene slowing of time and movement.
I grow drier and weightless and detached.
I welcome with joy the growing knowledge,
the revealing of memories that have always
existed
in the air and the water and the light around
me.
The spirit expands when the body contracts.
If I am truly lucky, I will be like him.
I will live beyond my life span
and someone will someday say of me
"The web of time is spun deeply in his eyes."
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