By Keelan Watlington
Don’t despair over the final realities,
When getting there is so fun, so right,
Living seems to forgive its outcomes and
Each night the opera singer belts her arias
Regardless. It keeps going on
And the spirits watch the beginnings of spring
With held breath, it keeps going on,
And the muses wander by the river seeking
The Orpheus they lost, and it keeps going on,
And truth steps forth from mortality like the rainbows
Emerge from their prison of rain, and our silent
Unspoken hopes slip through our pores, through our eyes,
And become the voice of God. We are the Romanticism,
That found its way through the outback, over the jutting ridge,
Past gasping acrid swamps, into a soft kingdom
Of questions without words. We are the last dreams of great men
Who died in a rapture of synthesis, we are the end of Paris,
And what we do will be what Paris meant, so we must find it,
The things that art became a creature for, culled its vineyard for.
In that way we’ll find the voice of time again,
In that way we’ll feel the sky’s intended winds again,
In that way we’ll see the larger designs that press ever against us,
Seeking a way into
Our divinity.
Keelan Watlington is a writer from Long Island, New York. His work moves between poetry, essays, and fiction, and has appeared in Danse Macabre. He is the author of the chapbook Gleamings. Drawing on a long, self-directed reading life across classical, Italian, and modern literature, his work favors clarity, pressure, and anagogy over ornament.
