Dimming

(Feb 2021. This poem is unfinished, but I am not at the point in my life where I am ready to finish it. I need to be in the desert again. It was written in Craggy Wash BLM land near Lake Havasu City, Arizona, where I camped for almost two months with dozens of amazing bus friends while building my skoolie home. I planned this poem to be in dialogue with Eliot’s Wasteland, and to indulge an existential negativity or nihilism. I plan on it being longer, and I also plan on countering it with a sister poem ‘Dawning,’ which will be more existentially optimistic and Whitmanic. The pair, Dimming and Dawning, will be in dialogue. But, I’m trying to put everything in my notebooks online roughly in order, so here is an incomplete rough draft of Dimming. I wrote it in February 2021, and I find it interesting how much my poetry improved over the course of 2021, the year I really exploded as a poet. To be honest I don’t think Dimming is super good rn, certainly not compare to later 2021 products like Green, but it will be.)

There is a moment
You feel it—
An undeniable
Drop.

The sun is downgoing always
But you do not feel it
Until the moment
A long strong moment
Like an em dash—

The sun is half set
Half now
Half the strength of shadow
Undeniably dimmer now
Dimming and dim

When the fiery illusion
Of the sphere’s full fight
Does not burn out
But knows it will.

In the dimming
I shiver.
It is definitely colder
I am definitely colder
Colder will definitely
Get colder faster
I am old and getting
older, faster.
And one day soon
I will die.

There are questions asked
In the dimming.
Will it be warm again?
Is there tomorrow?
Will I be there?
Will there be sorrow?
If I walk these dark rocks
Will there be water to borrow?
(Oh, the look on God’s face!)
Could it happen to me?
God is dead, should I be?
And why is death painted
So beautifully orange
Burning briefly in blue?
And why am I so
So cold and alone
So far away from you?
And what can I do
With the light I’ve been given
And given, but give it and give it?
But how can I give it when I am so cold?
But how can I live if it’s just growing old?
What am I worth, and when was I sold?
Do I dimly believe in the stories I’m told?
The meanings I mold? Dare I let go
Of the desperate western eye horizon hold?
And if I were to? If I turn
And look to the other end of blue?
If I do see
Pinkmauvemagenta and dragonscale blue
East, where earlier sunrises grew,
Could I make it meaningful
For me and for you, through
Agreement, the universal glue?
If I told you orange is faith and
Mauve is an eastern hope, could you
See with me and believe it is true?

When the dimming is near done
Questions must wait—
One must act.
When God is dead
The stars appear.
The witness now bears the sun’s fire
Alone,
Carrying the image of the crime of creation,
And must survive the night
Keeping the cold fire alive.

The wasteland can be lonely.

The birds twitter, the cooling air moves.
It is time to fear rattlesnakes,
And hide under red rocks.

There is only one shadow after sunset.

Dimly I see ever dimmer
Where I end and endless shadows
Begin creeping like rattlesnakes
Hunting dimmer-eyed dinner.

Our eyes have not adjusted well to the dimming,
And all we see are dark fears
And artificial lights.
We do not dare have faith in a sun
That would leave us.
We stare smally at supplements alone
In a dim world of undreaming stone,
With doubt seeming true, and anything
Grown thrown into fire, now ours alone.

“A sun dance? Be sensible.
We don’t need the sun.
Look at all our lights.
We have capitalized
On our loss.”

(to be continued…)