A Brief Spark in the Infinite Dark

By: Erik Rittenberry

Photo: TONY NAHRA

I have tried to write Paradise
Do not move
Let the wind speak
that is paradise.

--Ezra Pound

---

From that brief spark in the infinite dark, 
the shadowy chaos of the curious 
beginning, quivering atoms, rivers 
of molten rock, “the living elements at war 
with lifelessness,” the cosmic soup 
of our becoming, from a single-cell to
a self-conscious primate, rising from 
the primordial seas, the relentless 
urge to exist. 

And here we are. 

Civilized fools on the orb of our
imagined realities, the divine 
savage within dressed in the 
grandiose garments of suitability
to disguise the shadows of 
who we are.

Alive on a cold dreary morning, 
I walk out into the misty streets, 
a lonesome man with his collar up
and hat pulled low, I grow old, 
I grow old, with my trousers rolled, 
caught between the death of the old 
and the birth of the new, the 
streetlamps still aglow in the slow
gloom of dawn, the misery 
of history loiters in the chill 
of an ancient wind that sweeps 
debris and dead leaves 
past my boots and 
into the eaves.  

The friends that I once had have 
become a wet rag to my destiny, 
my spirit sings a melody no 
ear is attuned to hear. Like Rilke, 
“I am too alone in the world, 
and yet not alone enough."

I listen to the chimes of time and look out 
over the dismal city, the abandoned buildings
and old taverns, the spectacle of a peculiar  
madness emanating from a destitute 
drunkard sitting there, with his tattered 
garb and unblessed fate, on a crate 
in front of an old diner.

And the whores with crimson lips 
and smeared mascara stroll in heels 
“down eager avenues of lifelessness,” 
the fruits of their seductive labor 
tucked tight in their handbags. 

I look into the daunted eyes 
of beaten faces on the boulevard, a parade
of sorrows and world-weary sighs,
the sheer ache of being, "the 
bottomless horror of the world," 
and somehow, I too am here, 
an accident out of the infinite,
carrying my despair over shards 
of glass and secondhand needles,
flooding my senses with the rank
absurdities of an unpoetic era.

There's an unread poem tacked 
to a decrepit light pole in an alley,
I watch as tattooed lovers stroll
hand-in-hand through a graffitied park, 
all of us shrouded by hundred
year-old high-rises silhouetted
against the evanescent dark,
the stench of relentless progress 
taints the air, the forlorn sight of
a grocery cart lying on its side 
in a vacant lot, the sirens still 
lingering from the transgressions 
of the night.

Are we all just meager marionettes 
at the mercy of a cruel fate, doomed
to an inevitable defeat none of
us can escape?

If only we could train our eyes to see through 
the veneer of our pretend selves, the masks
we don, the beliefs we cling, our predicaments, 
our ostensible realities; if only our ears 
could finally hear the subtle sounds 
of our essence, the sacred melody 
gushing from our blood, the
universal stream flowing into 
the impalpable sea; if only…

The city stirs with the cries of desolation, 
the sighs of a bankrupt civilization, yet 
everything 
remains holy in its impermanence, 
sanctified in its brevity, and I walk on 
through the infertile grime,
an iridescent ghost, a brief spark
in the infinite dark, beneath
the false sky of the final
paradigm. 

---

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