Dark Side of Time
Time is the solution in which the living
and the dead confer—there’s no other place for us
or them and there’s no other place to be
(except where we are), putting our feet up
on the balcony and staring out at the empty
plain—where everything is invisible and everyone
has a name (the only way back is the way
you came), and once I played Odysseus
to her Penelope, way back when, and we stepped
from the bath in someone else’s house,
and once all the lights went out in the middle
of the night and we built a fire until the storm
abated, and later—it’s getting late in the day—
we’ll have caviar and champagne—at the edge
of the crater on the Sea of Dreams,
and look down to earth as if it was all one
and the same, and leave our footprints
for those who follow
Ed. note: Lewis Warsh, who passed away on 15 November 2020, was a vital player in the NY School in the heady days of the 1960s and 70s. He was a founding editor of two important magazines, Angel Hair and The World. A very fine poet, he was married to Anne Waldman and later to Bernadette Mayer. In 2013 when Bomb magazine posted "Darkj Side of Time," Lewis’s bio note identified him as the author of A Place in the Sun (Spuyten Duyvil), Inseparable: Selected Poems 1995–2005 and The Origin of the World (Creative Arts), and as the the editor and publisher of United Artists Books and director of the MFA program in creative writing at Long Island University in Brooklyn. His poems were chosen for three volumes in The Best American Poetry series (by editors James Tate, Robert Creeley, and Yusef Komunyakaa). For a link to four of his poems, click here.
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