Raymond Soulard, Jr. New Songs (for Kassandra) - The ...

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“I’m coming to offer her me. I don’t know what or how else”
“She knows. Stop worrying!”
“I can’t. I don’t know how.”
“Raymond she feels what you feel. Like I do. She would absorb your every pain if she
could.”
“I want her in my arms. I want her to feel me, my love entirely for her.”
“Soon. Soon. Soon.”
“Thank you”
“Keep on.”
“I am trying”
The one-eyed man amused regards Dr. Arnold T. Knickerbocker.
“All is grief because we must have it so. So I learned this & now I understand. All is
grief. Simple, eh?”
“Thine unocular vision, sir, besets thee with a view too
unwieldly to be credible. If one believed you openly the river
would need not bend, the cradle would need not be checked!”
The one-eyed man laughs delightedly. “My friend! Have wine with me! Here, take
some of this good bread!”
Knickerbocker persists with but his mug of bourbon-drenched coffee.
The one-eyed man lights a cigarette, rubs his knuckle against his moustache.
“Perhaps a choice, as you imply. Yes, room for thought. Perhaps you don’t need to decide
tonight. Leave it in doubt, eh? Yes! Good!”
Knickerbocker says nothing awhile. Then he looks at me writing these words. He
nods, almost cordially. He approves my struggle it seems.
A life’s anguish. An apex. A dream.
Rebecca sits with me quietly.
Her quiet awareness has always
gladdened me.
I summon it up now, wherever, a dusky roar of power to protect she I approach, to fill her
with my love & receive hers that we both will believe as hours approach us.
Rebecca looks at me &
smiles, her dark blue eyes great with intelligence
“Raymond, there is more good
reaching for you than you can
imagine. Love remembers. Deep love
needs no continual spark to road.”
“Why do I doubt myself, Rebecca?”
She smiles naked at me. “Chasing angels, Raymond.”
I nod. She holds me, if only in our joined minds tonight. She holds me for the other who
awaits me too.
The Cenacle | 59 | October 2006