Before The Golden Gate

Music: Conrad Cummings

Lyrics: from the novel-in-verse by Vikram Seth

Whether

It’s love or not means nothing much.

Love by itself’s a tightening tether,

A habit-forming drug, a crutch. . .

The impassioned advocate was wearing

A cambric blouse, a wine-dark suit,

An air both fragile and acute –

And there was something in her bearing

That seemed to make her flame and burn

With sorrow,

Again tonight the moon advances,

A casual crescent, fine and high,

A sort of innocent passerby

Across the city of Saint Francis,

Across the freeway, red and white,

With last month’s curvature and light.

Are the dead, too, defiled by sorrow,

Remorse, or anguish? We who live

Clutch at our porous myths to borrow

Belief to ease us, to forgive

Those who by dying have bereft us

Of themselves, of ourselves, and left us

Prey to this spirit-baffling pain.

The countries round our lives maintain

No memoirists and no recorders.

Those who are born are too young, those

Who die too silent, to disclose

What lies across the occluded borders

Of this bright tract, where we can see

Each other evanescently.

Slowly,

Dusk turns to dark, and from the car

Jan sees how, star by star by star,

The sky, now constellated wholly,

Domes over the fluid freeway, bright

With red and silver lanes of light.

Take this as proof

She loved you, saw through your evasion

And knew your love, was not aloof

From you; and without pride or rancor

Kept all you gave her. Do not hanker

For clarity; you cannot find

It now, or ever; be as kind,

As generous, and as incisive

With your grief as you know she’d be.

She loved you undeludedly

Though – self-protectively derisive

Of love, deluded and self-maimed

(Or unillusioned, as you claimed) –

You gave her nothing. . .

Ed drives on, hardly knowing why,

Across the tall-spanned bridge. Unthinking,

He parks, and looks out past the strait,

The deep flood of the Golden Gate.

Dear Reader, once upon

A time, say, circa 1980,

There lived a man. His name was John.

Successful in his field though only

Twenty-six, respected, lonely,

One evening as he walked across

Golden Gate Park, the ill-judged toss

Of a red Frisbee almost brained him.

He thought, “If I died, who’d be sad?

Who’d weep? Who’d gloat? Who would be glad?

Would anybody?” As it pained him,

He turned from this dispiriting theme

To ruminations less extreme.

Sighing

A harsh, prolonged, exhausted breath,

John feels his heart revisit death.

Depleted by his pain, he slowly

Walks to Jan’s desk. What did not last

In life has now possessed him wholly.

Nothing can mitigate the past.

He gently touches Jan’s sand dollar.

It soothes him in the ache, the squalor

That is his life, and she seems near

Him once again, and he can hear

Her voice, can almost hear her saying,

“I’m with you, John. You’re not alone.

Trust me, my friend; there is the phone.

It isn’t me you are obeying.

Pay what are your own heart’s arrears.

Now clear your throat; and dry these tears.”