For Dorothy, From Will – a poem by Diana Durham

For Dorothy, From Will 

Like a householder at winter dusk, pulling down
one blind then another, are you on some time
table I cannot comprehend shuttered within
warm against the onset of change? Are you captive 
inside the bright casket of a failing brain, 
or am I prisoner, shut outside in this night’s 
long slow advance? You seem lighter than before, 
unburdened by memory and habit, you sing 
still but the quavery voice, off key, that I hear
is not what you are listening to. What do you hear 
now, here now, beside me? Close by but out of reach, 
as you wait between the worlds, do you hear glory 
rolling through on golden clouds, inside, outside, is 
that untranslated joy the threshold where we meet?

Diana Durham is the author of four poetry collections: Sea of Glass, To the End of the Night, Between Two Worlds and Labyrinth; the novel The Curve of the Land and two nonfiction books: The Return of King Arthur and Coherent Self, Coherent World: a new synthesis of Myth, Metaphysics & Bohm’s Implicate Order.