Jeremy Gregg | Marketing, Fundraising & Entrepreneurship

“What profit hath a man from all his labor which he doeth under the sun?
One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever.
The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteneth to his place where he arose.”
- Ecclesiastes 1:3-5, 21st Century King James Version

the witching hour beckons, the ghost hour recoils;
the sun will never rise again for you, my love.

the heat of the day recedes into the evening;
the birds lock up their treasured songs in trees
(then, soon as sleep, they’re shunned into the breeze).

squirrels gather them in greedy maws, then pause.

this is the final winter.

the morning’s sun aroseth like a guinea tossed,²
sparkling in the mor– no, nothing sparkles in itself but pride.

the morning’s sun aroseth underneath the pillar of your tongue,³
and all your words were scor – no, no that’s not mine either.

the morning’s sun aroseth like –

the morning’s sun aroseth like a chorus to baptize the day in song,
but the noon crescendo found a corpse beside the altar;

at dusk, the coda was a jury’s call.

who now sits in judgment over the gasping sepulcher of this over-proud earth?
will there not a one remain to bury its bones? will it hang, glazed in death,
like a penny in a foreign pool?

(alas, my sweet, your commerce was a fallacy.)

the night comes, and the dead slip out to sea in boats bound each to each by twine;
a solitary moon looms overhead like a dry-tit nanny, her milky eyes all gape and hunger;
she draws them in, one by one, under the ocean skirt of her longing,
over the watery edge of their world;

underneath the waves, a fairy tailed captain sings to a drowned mast his songs recalling perfumed lace;
no fifteen men, no dead man’s chest, no bottles of rum; only endless drink, and the devil to choke it down.

————
February 17, 2004