In the second half of life

when I start to think as much about my end

       as about my beginnings

I come back to visit these windy heights

 

Starting at the end, ending at the beginning

here all the great inland rivers of my youth

start thin and chilly

before pouring out of the high country

onto the flat plains

and winding their fat, black muddy way

       backwards into my beginnings

 

and the dry stony broken high plains

from where I hail

little rain and what there is, much snow

are mirrored like a black and white photograph

in my present tense

 

I walk the squeaking floorboards of our life

listen to the traitor sounds of tortured pine

while translucent leaves the colour of old blood

shaped like the paw prints of strange, shadowy beasts

       fall in waves

 

Like a perfectly curved universe

where the beginning is also the end

nothing starts

but something else,

       to balance it, ends

and, in exact reverse,

no thing ends without a parallel beginning

 

moving in some undefinable direction

expanding at the speed of light

until, with a cataclysmic halt,

cracking and grinding galaxies

       everything turns back

time begins to run in reverse

 

Tired of the flicker of the city

the tizz of late-night parties

       after a dizzying tumble

through more than a decade

of lost promises

we have escaped the gravitational pull of great cities

moved from a vertical to a horizontal world

edges widening out to infinity

 

© Stephen Cassidy, 2003

Lithograph

poetry