Reynolds and Midway 49

         This, as I take it, was because all human beings, as we meet them, are    commingled out of good and evil... - Robert Louis Stevenson, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

   When Midway finally arrived at fifty

he stood astonished in his shoes, and he wondered.

When he was young, imprisoned in the safety

   of innocent bravado, he had pondered

mortality and black Oblivion—

wherein the absence of his heart's beat thundered

   flatlined, static, eon after eon,

in his ear-conchs—when in a dream he saw,

in a white field with nothing else, a lion;

   but what that vision meant he could not know.

At four or five such things are mysteries,

brief gifts from One whose work inspires awe

   and seemly gratitude. Life's vagaries

would grip him then and shape his forward path

with fresh amazements and a slew of crises.

   At some point Midway lost his native faith,

the clumsy grace with which he walked with God

in childish make-believe, when every breath

   was taken like a vision of a road

that rises on a graded plain between

two mesas where one day two men will ride

   up and through, mysteriously entering in

to legend, when the wind begins to howl

and someone sees them coming through the spin

   of dust, his own eyes peering through a cowl,

his belly gnawing, and his hand like leather,

reaching suddenly to sound a bell

   that brings the brave men of the town together

in loaded conclave: Ears prick, weapons cock,

and wives bolt doors, draw blinds, as if bad weather

   were on the way. Now in a tower a clock-

hand clicks, and with three more the hour

will strike, and madness overtake a flock

   of well-dressed mannequins and evil lour

like clouds, then blood will spill and whores bare skin,

their mouths agape for kisses, loosened hair

   flying like Salome's, corrupt with sin,

who, with sweet swivels of the pelvic carriage,

hypnotize their prey and lick them clean,

   and cast a wicked crooked hex on marriage,

that ancient rite more honored in the breach

than in the observance—but, lest we disparage

   the hen and spare the cock: Both sexes itch,

and rarely only given the lucky seven,

but from the first and ever after, each

   the other's too-familiar. Odd and even,

good and evil, dwell in everyone

and lust is ever present, never driven

   far from faith, and no-one is alone.

7.21.14