Moon cycle / Echo chamber
Simon Ravenscroft
Climbing the South Front library staircase
I notice how the rays of light fall in variable angles
through the geometric windows,
making interlacing patterns that move slowly
up the steps & wall
as the sun drops through the sky
like a stone. We, the mercantile, are kept
so impressively busy by the accumulation of means
that we forget that what is important to one
is unimportant to others, that our loves
are not symmetrical nor easily fitted together
& that this is the most common source of our troubles,
since in the ordinary run of things care
is not rewarded but rather carelessness
more so. It is obvious that this is something
mere increases in quantity can never resolve,
since what is at issue here is qualitative
& concerns differing intensities
of lived experience in relation to particular objects
as they move through space & time.
Within & beyond ourselves
we are often caught in the tensions
between things that matter too much
or too little; affections perish
which we assumed would last forever
& others arise to take their place, leaving us dazed
when we notice the change & worried
by our apparent forgetfulness
of who we once were.
Where does all this leave us?
As a churning nest of overlapping
light shards, never still or at rest?
A luminant jumble, incapable of peace?
For each one who seeks, the heights
are there to be scaled
but it seems the distant peaks will be forever
hidden in a hazy brilliancy,
while a kind of reverse gravity
exerts its effect, stars reflected
in the slop of the gutter
from high up there
in the blessed vacuum, eerie & soundless,
vacant yet always pulling at us.
Why are we so drawn to this celestial emptiness?
Here my thinking mind can penetrate
no further,
comes to a dead stop
at this airless brink, impatient
for the day to be done.
Sleep washes many things clean:
habitual frenzies of giddy feeling
pile up as the hours wear on into night & are cut loose
from their wakeful moorings
by slow delta waves,
ready to be carried away
in the crisp new light of morning.
There, consciousness glows
blue & calm & unmetaphorical,
the prior connections severed;
thoughts without marrow
float light & easy
while desire, shrunken & tranquil, waits
upon less clinical registers
of experience
to renew its troubled climb.
Simon Ravenscroft lives in Cambridge, England. He is a Fellow of Magdalene College at the University of Cambridge, working in the arts and humanities. He has published poems recently in Osmosis Press, The Penn Review, Apocalypse Confidential, Full House Literary, RIC Journal, High Horse, Red Ogre Review, La Piccioletta Barca, ē·rā/tiō, and other places. His website is simonravenscroft.haus.