The Falling Glass Poem by Glenn Latal

It does not come.

Perhaps it will bring release,
the unbridled exuberance of casting free
and shedding the need to lie;
to die alone in a foreign land,
where even the language doesn’t recognize you;
no longer any obligation to soothe, encourage, forgive;
at last, our grip loosing from the bough of grace.

Still, it does not come.

We have the first cursings of the wayward stare,
The driftless wanting eye.
Not callers of spirits from the vasty deep,
we remain merely welcomers of any that well of their own accord.
Nothing sought, revealed and inevitably denied,
banishing all the world.
Rather, an immaculate grail, faithfully formed,
earnestly cast, a brow’s Athena triumphantly self-willed.

And still, it does not come.

The light that I shun,
to which I can never quite unsquint,
it wakes and walks and when done, will sleep again.
Come dusk, we stand on a siding in the rain,
cloaked in conjecture, awaiting confirmation,
blighted by the awareness
of the limits of our glimpse of infinity.
Our gaze is calmly returned
by the dissolving horizon from the dark
at either end of the arrow shot vacant miles.
If there were a bend, it would lie just beyond,
any minute now, almost here.

Still, it does not come.