“Every object, rests on its certain devaluation/In the implacable fact of an ending—decay,/Dissolution, death—from which another/New thing and its solicitation emerges.”
What use this new extravagance of foliage—
Color in the lips—feathers spread on the air—
Bees on the flowerhead over there? All these—
Your own youth too—have been bought
With and into a currency of no appreciable
Worth, and each will be redeemed
At some moment of compulsion as having
No intrinsic or remaining value, becoming
Something that once was, another token
Of waste in time, failure of desire, possession.
There can be here no secure investment,
But always anticipation of ultimate forfeit,
An outcome obvious from the start:
And the longing for a seeming value
In things greater than the physically given—
To gamble on this—is to wager the whole
Position to ruin, for to treasure what is surplus—
Beauty alight in the eyes, the purity of a morning—
Is a bargain with total unavoidable loss,
Dispossession of the surfeit along with the real.
So the tenderness of feeling encompasses
The fragility of every known thing
Together with all that is human—the response
To beauty, to nature, acts of care, the commitment
Of devotion, the enrichment in the gift
Of loving, being loved—every such venture,
Every object, rests on its certain devaluation
In the implacable fact of an ending—decay,
Dissolution, death—from which another
New thing and its solicitation emerges.
Perhaps the cycling of money, the ubiquity
Of purchase and sale, the brief inflation of this
Or that asset, would be image enough
For life, all being, in its manifest materiality:
Thing after thing, person after person, appearing,
Disappearing, in exchange of one good
For another? So it would if everything
Which is—with all that is desired, held close—
Were of value only in trading, and the surface
Of the earth merely the floor of a stock exchange.
Harold Jones is a New Zealander, who was educated at Cambridge University, where he was awarded an Exhibition to read English. His poetry has been widely published in literary journals in the United Kingdom and New Zealand, and it has won the acclaim of pre-eminent critics and poets: among them, Ted Hughes, who wrote, “I hear a real voice, a real movement of mind cutting through resistances.” In the United States, his poems appear in Merion West and VoegelinView.
